Wood Fired Saunas UK

A category was growing in the UK — wood-fired and outdoor saunas, mobile sauna businesses, people building their own — and the information about it was scattered across Instagram accounts, booking links, and word of mouth. There was no single, trustworthy place to find an operator near you, or a builder who actually works in wood-fired rather than electric.

I built one. It's live at woodfiredsaunas.co.uk: a directory of 277 operator listings, 68 wood-fired builders, and 11 practical guides, with a map, regional browsing, and editorial standards applied to every entry.

What it is

A content-led directory, not a booking platform. Three pillars: where to go for a sauna (the operators), who to commission if you want to build one (the builders), and how the whole thing works (the guides). It runs on Next.js and Supabase, deploys on Vercel, and is structured so the same codebase can be cloned for an entirely different category later.

The decisions that mattered were the exclusions

The build is ordinary; the judgement is in what I deliberately didn't do.

• No booking engine. No SaaS layer. The obvious "monetise it" move is to bolt on bookings and take a cut. I left it out on purpose. A directory earns trust by being useful and neutral first; a half-built booking product attached to a thin directory is worse at both jobs than either done properly. The booking engine is explicitly parked, not forgotten — it's a later move that only makes sense once the directory is the place people already go.
• Editorial discipline over volume. It would be easy to inflate the listing count with scraped, unchecked entries. Instead there's a house style — facts before adjectives, British English, no "wellness brochure" tone — and a hard-banned phrase list (no "nestled", no "ultimate", no "luxurious sanctuary"). Operators and builders are verified. A smaller, honest directory reads as more credible than a bigger, vaguer one.
• AI does the enrichment; a human signs off. There's a standalone AI pipeline that enriches listing data, but nothing writes to the live database without human approval. AI is used where it removes grunt-work, and constrained where its mistakes would show.
• Built as a reusable template, not a bespoke one-off. The structure is a clone-ready platform seed. That's a bet that the system — directory + editorial standards + data quality + enrichment pipeline — is the reusable asset, more than this one vertical.

Where it is now

Live and maintained. The enrichment queues are cleared; it ships new guides and listing improvements at a steady cadence rather than in bursts. The longer-term thesis — directory as infrastructure for something larger — is held deliberately in the background, not rushed.