High Bridge Wellness

High Bridge Wellness is a wellness building in Snohomish, Washington — sauna, steam, shower, a deck, and a room worth staying in afterwards. AVI designed the interior around one thing the client said early: the sauna is only part of the evening.

So the plan is written as a sequence rather than a set of rooms. Shower, steam, sauna, cold plunge, hot tub, fire, and then somewhere to lie down and stay another hour. The daybeds outside are not styling — they are the last step in the programme, and everything before them is arranged to deliver you there.

The brief for how it should look was three words long: good masculine design. Not theatrical, not decorated — characterful enough that the building reads as somewhere you go, rather than something you use.

That lands as a dark natural palette held steady through every room. Grey stone tile in two formats, weathered timber, sand plaster and black concrete plaster, marble kept to the darker ranges, and light that stays low and warm. Nothing is bright. The building reads as one continuous material rather than a set of finishes, which is what lets a small footprint feel substantial.

Outside, the programme carries on. A long linear fire runs along one edge of the gravel terrace with timber chairs pulled around it — the place people end up between sessions, when it is too cold to stay wet and too early to go back in.

The deck grows to hold the hot tub, the cold plunge and a place to lie down, but the roof cannot follow it: one side of the site leaves only a five-foot setback, so extending the existing roof was never on the table. A retractable pergola covers the new ground instead — open when the weather allows, closed when it does not.

Entry is deliberately not a corridor to the sauna. It opens straight into the dark material language of the rest of the building — shingled wall, black joinery, stone underfoot, a hook for a robe — so the shift from outside happens at the front door rather than at the sauna door.

Past it, the great room and kitchen work as one space — 318 square feet doing the job of a whole house. A round table, because a round table is what a group actually sits around. A television, because the client asked to be able to sit here afterwards and watch something. And a bar kept open on shelves rather than shut behind doors.

Under the existing roof, the covered terrace does the in-between work: sheltered on one side, furnished properly rather than with patio pieces, open to the trees on the others. It is the part of the plan that keeps the building usable in the months when the open deck is not.

The wet rooms are small and deliberately dark. Steam is fifty-one square feet, sauna seventy-nine, shower fifty-four — enough for the function and nothing spare, which is what allows each one to be finished properly rather than adequately.

Grey stone runs floor to ceiling and the light comes out of the surfaces rather than down from above — a cove behind the bench, a strip inside the niche, a line in the ceiling. A basin cut from dark stone, black fittings, nothing that shines. In rooms this size, where the light sits matters more than what it is.

The sauna kept what was already built. The existing bench stays, and the door stays where it is — the siding outside is finished, and moving the opening would have meant undoing it. The heater is electric, sized to the room rather than chosen first.

The shower is the one room with a surprise in it. Twin rain heads sit under a single line of light, and above them hangs a barrel that tips one cold load over you at once — the client's own idea, and the hinge between the hot end of the sequence and the cold one.