About
I lived in Osaka for two years teaching English through the JET Program, where sento culture first got its hooks in me — plain, functional neighborhood bathhouses, nothing precious about them. Correspondent work later took me to Beijing, and I kept finding my way to bathhouses there, and afterward in Brooklyn. A 2023 trip to Norway was different: the first time I saw sauna-building treated as an actual craft, with real physics behind it, instead of a wellness accessory.
I've spent 20 years as a journalist, most of it editing international news — 17 years at Radio Free Asia, before that as a correspondent in Beijing. That job trained me to ask basic questions and say plainly when I don't know something yet. I'm bringing the same approach here.
Varme hasn't built a client sauna yet. What I have is real firsthand knowledge of what makes a sauna good, and I'm doing the work now — carpentry coursework, a dedicated sauna-building course this fall — to be able to build one right.