Rezen Turns 1903 Fremantle Hotel Stables Into Alchemy Saunas

Arched openings and rough brick walls evoke a Roman bathhouse at Alchemy Saunas, a new wellness centre in Fremantle, Australia, by interior design studio Rezen.

The project transformed a former stable and cellar at the base of the Royal George Hotel, a building that dates back to 1903 and is currently undergoing redevelopment. Rezen chose to highlight the existing red brick and local Tamala limestone surfaces, complementing them with what the studio calls "utilitarian" additions in steel and tilework.

"Given its history as a space of utility, the project uses a design language which is pragmatic, raw and direct," studio director Rhys Bowring told Dezeen.

"Philosophically, we wanted the new material palette to be recessive and allow the existing materiality to be the focal point," Bowring said. "We also wanted to use materials that were not overly decorative, self-finishing and utilitarian in keeping with its original use."

The layout was constrained. Any new openings had to correspond to locations pre-approved for a previous hospitality project that was later abandoned.

Visitors enter via the hotel's basement. A steel staircase in the reception leads up to the changing rooms and showers, which sit behind a stainless steel wall that starkly contrasts the original rough limestone walls.

A sauna occupies the western corner of the plan, finished externally with glazing and tiles and lined internally with pale timber. Another steel stair leads back down into the basement to two central pools — one an ice pool, the other a warm magnesium pool — positioned within the double-height volume of the former stable and illuminated by large, arched windows.

Concrete seating wraps these pools and doubles as buttressing for the adjacent brick wall. To the south, a waiting area is flanked by additional saunas and bathrooms.

Rezen kept the newly created connecting openings as pared-back as possible, cutting through the existing brick and limestone and inserting exposed steel lintels and surrounds.

"The spatial organisation is based on opportunities and constraints of the existing buildings," Bowring explained. "Saunas don't require a great deal of height, so these and the washrooms are generally located where there is not much height or outlook."

"Communal bathing areas are provided with the most generous areas with good daylighting and ceiling heights," he added. "It creates a variety of atmospheres between dark, heavily protected spaces and generous naturally lit areas."

The photography is by Jack Lovel.

Alchemy Saunas joins a growing wave of ambitious bathhouse design, including a Beijing spa by FOG Architecture intended to be more than a "quiet place" and the UK's largest sauna by Cake Architecture, which its designer described as "hedonistic" — a sign that adaptive reuse and communal bathing are increasingly converging in contemporary wellness architecture.