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It was a windy Wednesday evening when I arrived at Sense of Self – flustered by the mid-week workload, the weird weather and city life in general. Stepping off South Dowling Street into the immaculately converted warehouse, air laced with a blend of essential oils and a sort-of osmosis calm, I bumped straight into two friends who had just emerged from the subterranean palace beneath my feet, and I’ll be honest – I thought they were putting it on. The overt zen that they were embodying didn’t seem like something anyone could, realistically, achieve at 5pm on a Wednesday in Sydney, but lordy was I wrong. After two hours spent between the saunas, steam room and magnesium-enriched pools, I floated up the stairs with a similar sense of cellular-level stillness. There’s something in the water at Sense of Self – it is, somehow, so much more than a bathhouse, it’s a certified reset.
After first teasing plans for Sense of Self Surry Hills last year, the beloved Melbourne-born bathhouse has opened its first Sydney outpost inside a sprawling converted warehouse on South Dowling Street, and it's a true gift to this fast-paced city. The 1,200-square-metre space was designed by architecture practice Ritz & Ghougassian, and self-care offering aside, it’s a feat of architectural beauty. The cavernous building features more than 90,000 hand-laid bricks used alongside the building’s original windows – retaining something of the old warehouse’s industrial character as a grounding shell to the otherworldly space.
The layout is deliberately maze-like, so there isn’t really a single route through the bathhouse. You move between the different rooms and pools following your whims – with low lighting and deliberately dark features adding to the dreamlike energy.
The main bathing area centres around a large hot mineral pool (complete with chess boards), built around the building’s original columns. There’s another pool near the saunas, as well as two darker pools that feel like your own private bathing cave. The spaces are intended for slow sessions rather than moving quickly between treatments, and there are enough different areas that the bathhouse doesn’t feel particularly crowded, even when it’s booked and busy (which, let’s face it, it’s going to be).
There are two Finnish saunas: a larger one – the largest in the Southern Hemisphere – that can accommodate events and scheduled Aufguss (sauna ritual) sessions, and a smaller sauna for a quieter, less social experience. Carefully tiled and decked out with personal showers and cute little wooden buckets, the steam room is where you get hands on – build your Hammam Kit from the Scrub Station on street level, and head to the steam room to nourish your skin with the SoS’s signature range of gorgeous, enriching products.
For a contrast therapy shake-up, the cold plunge takes a different approach to the sort of dunkable ice baths we’re used to. Rather than being a small pool you step into and immediately step back out of, it’s designed as a walk-through, giving you a sort-of transitional hit of cold when you feel like challenging yourself. Overall, though, challenge is not the approach here – it’s less about functional recovery, more about achieving a body-and-soul reset in an unfathomably beautiful setting.
Upstairs, the treatment area has dedicated rooms for massages and facials, as well as a beautifully-designed lounge space that’s impossible to leave.
Maybe the most out-of-the-box addition is the Room of Deep Listening: a dark, heavily amplified room where the focus is on sound rather than bathing, with different audio journeys curated by artists rotating throughout the year.
A two-hour bathing session costs $75 off-peak or $85 at peak times. Robe and towel hire is $15, while a Hammam Kit costs $35, with subsequent refills priced at $15. Massages and other treatments start at $190.
You can learn more and book over here.
Note: We were kindly hosted at Sense of Self, but our editorial recommendations are always honest.
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