There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over Copenhagen’s harbour in September — the light turns low and gold, the water cools by the day, and the club’s regulars start asking, half-jokingly, when the season’s first proper gathering is happening. This year the answer is The Heat Club — A Weekend Festival, three days that widen the studio’s usual rhythm into something closer to a small festival: guided sauna rounds, a sound bath, open community hours, and a lineup built to give both first-timers and long-time members a reason to block out the whole weekend, not just a single evening.
Nothing about the format is loud. There is no stage, no headline act, no schedule of performances to plan an evening around. Instead, the festival is organised the way the club itself is organised — around rituals that ask for very little except presence: sit in the heat, get in the cold, breathe, listen, and do it again in the company of people who have learned to take all of that seriously without taking it too seriously. What changes across the weekend is not the ritual but its shape — quiet and guided on Friday, structured and rotating on Saturday, loose and unscheduled on Sunday.
Friday · Sound & Reset Sep (11, 6:30 PM · €39)
The weekend opens gently, with a session built for arrival rather than performance. At 6:30 PM on Friday, September 11, sound practitioner Dee O’Connor leads a Sound Bath designed to ease the room out of the working week before any heat is introduced — a slow unfolding of resonant tones, gongs and layered vibration, meant to settle the nervous system rather than entertain it. Participants lie down, eyes closed, and let the sound do the work that a warm-up usually does elsewhere.
From there, the group moves directly into Deep Reset, a guided sauna round paced for depth rather than speed: long, unhurried rounds, considered breathing cues between infusions, and short cooling breaks that give the body time to actually register the heat rather than rush past it. The combined evening runs at €39 per person and is deliberately capped in size, since the format depends on a room small enough for O’Connor’s instruments to be heard clearly over the stove.
Saturday · A Day of Guided Rounds (Sep 12, 9 AM–7 PM · €15/session)
Saturday, September 12, is the festival’s longest and most communal day, running continuously from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM as a cycle of guided sauna sessions rather than a single fixed programme. Instead of one long open house, the day breaks into rotating rounds, each led by a different saunameister and built around its own aufguss — a distinct aromatic infusion, pace and towel choreography from one session to the next, so a person who joins at ten in the morning has a genuinely different experience from someone who arrives at four in the afternoon.
Each round costs €15 per person and is booked individually, which means the day works equally well as a single focused visit or a loose, stay-as-long-as-you-like way to spend a Saturday moving between the sauna, the harbour water and the benches outside. By early evening, as the rounds slow and the light drops, the day tends to soften into its most social hour — fewer formal cues, more conversation, the kind of unstructured time the earlier sessions are, in a sense, quietly building toward.
Sunday · Social Sauna (Sep 13, 9 AM–8 PM)
Sunday, September 13, closes the weekend with Social Sauna, the festival’s longest single stretch, open continuously from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM.
Festival offer
Sunday 2-for-1 Promo
Book any Sunday session for €15 and bring someone with you for free. At checkout, apply the code FEST26 to your Sunday booking and your companion’s entry drops to €0 — no separate ticket needed.
Guest pass is valid at reception only when arriving with a fully paid attendee.
Where Saturday is organised around structured, saunameister-led rounds, Sunday drops the schedule almost entirely. Sessions are self-paced, doors stay open all day, and the emphasis shifts from guided ritual to simply being there — sauna, cold plunge, quiet conversation on the deck, and long stretches of unstructured time, for as long as anyone wants to stay. It is, by design, the softest and most communal day of the three: the one built for people who came for Friday’s sound bath and ended up staying the whole weekend, and for the club’s regulars, who tend to treat Sunday as their usual gathering — just with more familiar and unfamiliar faces around the stove than on an ordinary week.
Before You Arrive
A few practical notes for anyone building their weekend around The Heat Club. Bring two towels rather than one — a dry towel for sitting inside the sauna, and a second for drying off after each cold dip, since Copenhagen’s September water does not forgive a shared one. Flip-flops or sandals are worth packing for the walk between the sauna, the changing area and the water, and a swimsuit is required for every session, including Friday’s sound bath. Because rounds and check-ins run on schedule, arriving ten to fifteen minutes early is the difference between easing into the space and missing the first infusion — particularly on Saturday, when back-to-back sessions leave little room to catch up once a round has started.
Whichever day — or days — you choose, the festival runs on the same idea that shapes every regular session at the club: heat and cold work better in company than alone, and a festival is really just that idea, stretched across three days by the water.
