The Well

Bus 81 leaves Oslo every ten minutes or so and takes about forty-five minutes to Granholtet, a stop in the commuter forest of Sofiemyr, thirteen kilometres south of the centre. The building it serves is long and low, grey timber and glass, under a canopy of weathering steel; the bus stop stands at the door, and by the door stands a bronze nude on a plinth. The sculpture trail, it turns out, begins before the ticket desk. Inside, reception takes your coat, your phone goes into a locker, and a sign explains the house’s founding principle: continental spa culture, with natural nudity in the saunas. In Norway this sentence made national news.

The builder is the easy part of the story to tell. Stein Erik Hagen, the discount-retail billionaire the Norwegian press calls Rimi-Hagen, announced the project in 2011 with a budget of 150 million kroner; the frame rose towards 350 million; and the plant opened on 4 December 2015, on a site that had already been baptised Aqua Vitae and Aquarius before settling on The Well. What made it controversial was not the money but the bare skin: Hagen had imported the sauna code of the German Schwartzwald, where swimwear in the sauna is the transgression, into a country whose public baths are swimsuit country. The papers spent the first season arguing about the naked spa. Then came the other story, the quieter one: the accounts. The Well has lost money every year of its life, more than 230 million kroner in the first decade, 11.7 million in 2024 alone, and Hagen, asked about it, replied by text message: “So far The Well has not been an economic success. Far too many unfortunate circumstances.” A 104-room hotel was bolted on in 2021, the kitchen and conference floors filled in behind it, and the local press has now reported the first operating profit. Ten years to break even, on a private bath built at the scale of a public one: the most Norwegian spa story imaginable.

The rules take a page to read and an hour to unlearn. In the saunas and steam rooms swimwear is not allowed at all; you sit on a towel, or on nothing. In the pools swimwear is optional, with one catch: it has to be The Well’s own, sold at reception for around 300 kroner, a brown speedo or a black bikini. Your own swimsuit stays in the locker. On Tuesdays swimwear becomes compulsory throughout the building, which must be the one day the place looks like an ordinary Norwegian swimming hall. Phones and cameras are banned from the spa reception inward, which is why the nude statue outside is the only one that has been photographed to death. On my visit perhaps half the guests went bare and half bought the suit, and within the first hour the nakedness that scandalised Oslo in 2015 had become the least remarkable thing in the building. A man carrying a tray of aufguss ice walked past two guests deep in a paperback, and neither looked twice.

The circuit runs over three floors of a building that calls itself the Nordic countries’ largest spa, 10,500 square metres of them. The first floor holds the big pool, ringed by jacuzzis and flanked by the sauna ring: fifteen saunas and steam rooms tuned from dry 90-degree Finnish heat through an art-deco steam room to a tepidarium, the dry ones entered barefoot with a towel under you, the steam rooms fitted with hoses for washing the benches down. A warm basin and an ice-cold plunge sit at the ends of the ring; the Finnish sauna and the cold basin alternate until the skin stops arguing. The second floor is the quiet one: a hammam washed by an attendant for a surcharge, twenty-five treatment rooms, lounges where the day’s guests lie like laundry. The third floor is where the money went: a Japanese bath house with an outdoor onsen, a meditation sauna, and a ritual programme that runs all day, an attendant throwing scented ice over the stones to music, a different scent each session. Outside are hot tubs, cabanas, a pool bar, and a cold outdoor pool left at about ten degrees for the hardy; beyond them the sculpture trail runs into the trees, and the guests walk it in robes, or not.

The hotel side of the house removes every remaining reason to dress. Rooms come without televisions; dinner at the Brasseriet is eaten in bathrobes, French food under house rules of no phones; the tasting menus are served at Mori on the eighth floor, kaiseki-style, with the forest going dark outside. A three-night room-and-breakfast package with unlimited spa runs about 4,000 kroner, which is the honest way to see the place: the day crowds thin out in the evening, and the 10-to-10 day ticket (625 kroner; 545 for the midday and evening slots) only covers the loud half of the programme.

The spa has its grievances, and I collected a few myself: a reception that reads its scripts with the warmth of a locker room, parking and drinking water priced as extras, treatments that cost as much as the room they are taken in. None of it touches the argument for the rank. N° 7 of Saunas & Baths 2026 makes The Well the only Norwegian entry on the list, and the visit left the rank standing, on the strength of the ritual discipline, the scale, and the walk through the cold forest air between two pools. Hagen lost a quarter of a billion kroner building the continent inside Norway. The continent was worth it.

N° 7 · Saunas & Baths 2026

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