If you like your pleasure served up with a dose of pain, pay a visit to Seattle’s Banya 5 day spa. It’s anything but your typical day at the spa, but you’ll leave Banya 5 with more of a feeling of peace than a day of manis and pedis could ever provide.
The spa’s signature experience and namesake, the Russian banya, is time spent in a hot room that resembles a humid sauna. In Russian tradition, the heat is punctuated with blasts of cold “perhaps from a foray into the frigid outdoor air or a cold lake. And that’s where the pain comes in.
The Banya 5 experience begins in the parilka, or brick oven, where you tough out the 200-plus degree temperatures generated by a 20-ton granite fireplace. After you’ve sweated to your heart’s content, you open the heavy wooden door and get your blast of cold by heading straight into the 55-degree plunge pool. Talk about a rude awakening.
It may sound like torture “and in fact, it may feel that way at first “but it doesn’t take many hot-cold cycles to understand why the banya has enjoyed centuries’ worth of popularity in Russia. The heat relaxes the muscles and gets the blood flowing; the cold wakes up every cell in the body. You’re flushing yourself out, shutting everything down, starting it back up, and coming to homeostasis, says John Goodfellow, who opened the spa with three business partners in 2004.
Not everything about Banya 5 is so extreme. Between ventures into the parilka and the plunge pool, you can relax in the tepid salt-water tub, the jetted hot tub, or the eucalyptus-scented steam room. Afterwards, try one of their additional spa services, like a deep-tissue massage or a skin-sloughing salt scrub.
Starting this summer, you’ll be able to end your banya experience in true Russian fashion “with infused vodkas, borscht, and caviar at the bar Goodfellow plans to open two doors down.
For more information call (206) 262-1234 or visit www.banya5.com; admission: $30, robe rental: $3; bathing suits optional on same-sex days.
Deirdre Shevlin Be
July/August 2007
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