Oslo’s Floating Sauna Is Making Public Wellness Look Easy

Oslo’s Trosten isn’t just a floating sauna with a fjord view — it’s a surprisingly good argument for making public wellness feel beautiful, accessible, and actually public.

Trosten is a floating sauna in Oslo’s Sukkerbiten sauna village, near the Munch Museum, where people come to sit in the heat, look out over the fjord, and then make the questionable-but-invigorating decision to step into cold water.

What makes Trosten especially interesting isn’t just the view, or the steam, or the very Scandinavian promise of becoming a calmer person through temperature shock. It’s that the sauna was designed as a public facility — for actual people to use.

A Sauna That Doesn’t Act Exclusive

There is something funny about wellness culture, isn’t there?

The language is always about calm, healing, restoration, and community. Then you look at the actual spaces and realize half of them seem designed for people who already own linen pants, have flexible work schedules, and know exactly what adaptogenic mushrooms are.

Trosten goes in a different direction.

According to Oslo Badstuforening, the sauna has universal design features — room for two wheelchairs, a lower bench that can be pushed in, electric fans, heating cables in outdoor areas, railings, and an automatic door opener. The amphitheater is also wheelchair-accessible in the front row.

That may not sound like a headline. But it kind of is.

Access isn’t a cute bonus feature. It’s the difference between “everyone is welcome” as a slogan and “everyone is welcome” as a lived reality.

The Little Green Building

Visually, Trosten knows exactly what it’s doing.

It sits by the fjord near Norway’s Munch Museum, and the connection is deliberate — Estudio Herreros designed both.

Trosten isn’t trying to be invisible. It’s colorful, odd, and sculptural, with a sauna cabin, a terrace with direct water access, and an amphitheater facing the fjord. It’s not just a place to sweat quietly and consider your life choices.

Why It’s More Than a Sauna

The Oslo Sauna Association has been working since 2016 to bring sauna culture to more people, and it shows — 15,000 members and 250,000 visits in 2023. Trosten landed on TIME’s 2025 World’s Greatest Places list as a sustainably built, universally accessible floating sauna that opened in May 2024.

I don’t want to over-romanticize a sauna. It is, at the end of the day, still a room where people sit around sweating together and pretend this is normal. Humanity is weird. Beautiful, but weird.

But Trosten is an example of a better version of public life — useful and still playful, sustainable and still beautiful, accessible and still desirable.

I don’t know when I’m getting to Oslo next, but Trosten is on the list!