Ohio’s first outdoor sauna and cold plunge complex planned for Cleveland riverfront

Saunagoose was pitched as more than a wellness amenity. On the northern tip of Scranton Peninsula, with the Cleveland skyline in view, Gino Faciana and Pleasant Valley Corp. planned what they described as Ohio’s first outdoor sauna and cold plunge complex, a year-round destination built on heat, cold immersion and the kind of ritual that has usually lived in home garages, backyard setups and boutique studios.

The early rendering showed a mix of outdoor warmth and recovery-minded refresh, including cold plunges and hot tubs. Just as important, the concept was framed as a guided sauna experience rather than a purely do-it-yourself setup. That detail changes the feel of the project. It is not just a place to buy access to water and wood heat; it is being shaped as a managed experience, one that can package contrast therapy as something social, polished and easy to walk into on a winter night off the river.

The setting gives the plan a bigger meaning than a new amenity on the water. Scranton Peninsula has long been treated as a piece of the city with redevelopment upside, and this proposal folded into a broader riverfront transformation. By putting a sauna-and-plunge concept on a former brownfield site, the developers linked the current cold-plunge boom to an older Cleveland story about reuse, access and what kinds of businesses can turn overlooked land into a destination.

That also puts the project at the center of a larger shift in ice bath culture. The cold plunge is no longer only a private habit for affluent homeowners or a feature tucked inside high-end recovery clubs. Here, it was being used as placemaking, a way to draw people to the Flats and keep them there in all seasons, not just during summer weekends. The model suggested a future in which contrast therapy becomes part of civic leisure, visible from the riverfront and woven into the city’s daily social life.

If the plan moves ahead, Saunagoose would join a growing class of hybrid wellness concepts that blend design, waterfront development and recovery culture into one public-facing package. For Cleveland, that means the cold plunge is not staying in the margins. It is stepping into the skyline.