Guests had been asking for somewhere to warm up and slow down. The hot tubs answered part of it. A hot-stone sauna in the old peat shed answered the rest.
I’d been hearing it from guests for a while. People come to Donegal to slow down, and the hot tubs proved how much that matters: they’re the first thing booked and the last thing anyone wants to leave. Heat, the view, time to do nothing: it’s a good part of why people come at all.
A sauna was the natural next step. Same idea (heat, restoration, the bay in front of you), but a different ritual. It isn’t an add-on we dreamed up. It’s the thing people were already asking for.
The sauna is in what used to be the peat shed, a small stone outbuilding with a corrugated roof and a dry-stone wall on either side. We took it back to nothing. The floor came up, dug down to bare earth, and for a while it was a spade standing in the mud and a mortar tub in the corner.
Every restoration here starts like that. Strip it back, see what you’ve actually got, keep what’s worth keeping.
The dry-stone walls are the oldest thing in the building, and we wanted to keep them exposed inside. But dry stone lets damp through, so before anything else we sealed the bottom of the walls and the back wall with concrete to stop any ingress, and pointed the wall on the left, the one you face as you come in.
Then the floor was poured, a pitched ceiling went in over the stone, and the one small window that was already in the wall was kept and given a new timber lintel. By that stage it was a room again, closed in, and dry.
Davey John’s sits on a hillside, so none of this is on the flat. To get a level terrace outside the sauna door we had to build a retaining wall first, holding the ground back behind it. That’s the run of block and concrete going in around the building in a lot of these shots.
The sauna was built on site, inside the stone shell: pine cladding going up panel by panel, benches at two levels, the heater and its stones in the corner. It’s a hot-stone sauna: electric, with coals on top.
The first time the electrics were connected and the lights came on (the pine glowing, the heater ready) was the moment it stopped being a building site and started being a sauna.
Outside the door we built a level terrace and laid it in Donegal Quartz crazy paving; the same stone runs along the top of the low wall we built for the shower. Then the copper rainfall shower went on the whitewashed wall, with a drain set into the paving.
The cold-then-hot cycle is the whole point of a sauna, so the shower mattered as much as the heat.
The last of it was the limewash: the whole building brought back to bright white render, new black gutters above, the red door in the gable.
Once the building was done I went next door to Kiwi Nurseries for the courtyard planting. Black bamboo was one of my favourites; it went in around the terrace with the rest of the pots. The wooden signs were handcrafted, and teak furniture made to match, for the sauna, and for both cabins too.
It looks down across the smallholding to Mulroy Bay, the same view the cabins have. Then we left it alone, which is the best thing you can do with a finished room.
The sauna takes about twenty minutes to come up from cold to 85°C, and then it’s yours for as long as you want it. There’s no booking and no time slot; it’s open around the clock to everyone staying with us, and never opened to anyone from outside.
Pour a little water on the stones for the steam. Cool off under the copper shower. Go again.