Byron taught us what a bathhouse wants to be. Prahran is where we get to say it again, at the scale of a city. A second Navia is being built in Melbourne now, and it opens in Winter 2026: larger, more layered, built for a different kind of week.
Melbourne moves to its own rhythm. The days are cooler, the pace is sharper, and winter here has a length to it that Byron never knows. A bathhouse in this city isn't a holiday indulgence. It's a place to come back to through the cold months, again and again.
The bones are Nordic, the same as Byron's. In the traditions we draw on, heat and cold aren't occasional treats but part of an ordinary week, and the sauna was never only a place to warm up. It was where people gathered. Sweat, soak, savour, repeat, now with the room for a whole city to practise it.
The saunas
Two saunas will anchor the heat. The largest, a teepee sauna set to be the biggest in Australia, is built across multiple levels so you can choose how deep you go, from a gentle introduction to something more intense. It runs between 90 and 100 degrees, in step with Finnish practice. Beside it sits the silent sauna, a quieter room kept intentionally free of conversation, where the outside world softens and your attention returns to your breath.
The pools
From heat, the body moves toward water. Two magnesium pools will be held warm enough to let you fully let go. It's often here that people stay a little longer than they meant to, the nervous system slowing by degrees.
The cold
Cold is the part that looks confronting and turns out to be where the clarity lives. Prahran is being built with several ways into it. A cold plunge offers a more gradual introduction, while three ice plunges, each at a different temperature, let you work your way down at your own pace. Cold, then properly cold.
The steam room
For something softer there's the steam room, a gentler kind of heat held around 52 degrees and infused with frankincense. It's enveloping rather than intense, the sort of room people linger in between rounds, or settle into before stepping back out into the pace of the street.
A place to land
Prahran moves quickly; there's always somewhere to be. Navia isn't here to compete with that, only to offer a room off to the side of it: a lounge where doing less feels like enough. We're glad to be joining the neighbourhood, and to become part of its rhythm in our own quiet way.
Foundation memberships exist for people who want a regular practice built into the week, with unlimited access to the bathhouse once it opens. What we keep seeing is that the benefits deepen with consistency, physically and mentally both, as the ritual becomes easier to return to.
It's honest work, and unhurried by design: we'd rather open it right than open it early. Winter 2026 is the marker. When the Melbourne cold sets in, there'll be somewhere to answer it, a new set of rooms running on the same slow clock as the first.
