As of September 2026, a sauna, a steam room and a cold plunge sit on the amenity floor of nearly every new Miami tower, and in a handful of residences, the Rivage Wellness Penthouse among them, they sit inside the home, indoors and on the terrace. The word sauna covers two different machines. The plunge covers a plumbing decision. Both are worth understanding before the contract.
One paragraph if that is all you need: a traditional sauna heats the air, to a high temperature, with a stove and stones; an infrared cabin heats the body directly with emitters at a lower air temperature. They are different rooms with different electrical and ventilation needs. A cold plunge is a chilled, filtered pool that needs a chiller, filtration and a drain, and a place for the moisture to go. Inside a residence, each is a specification, and each has a running cost. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
A traditional sauna is a wood lined room with an electric or wood stove and stones, run hot and dry with water thrown for steam, and it needs heavy electrical supply, ventilation and heat resistant construction. An infrared cabin uses emitters that warm the body rather than the air, runs at a lower temperature, and needs less power and less ventilation, which is why it fits inside a residence more easily. Steam rooms are a third thing: a sealed, tiled room with a generator, needing waterproofing and a drain.
Manufacturers and wellness brands make claims for each. The desk records the claims as theirs and reads the specification: which room, what emitter or stove, what power, what ventilation, where the moisture goes.
A cold plunge is a small pool held at a low temperature by a chiller, with filtration and sanitation like any pool, a drain, and in Miami a chiller working against the climate every hour of the year. Outdoors on a terrace it needs a shaded, ventilated equipment space; indoors it needs the moisture managed or the room suffers. It is the single wellness feature most often drawn on a rendering and least often specified in a document.
Not the labels. The systems. A plunge in a rendering is a label. A plunge with a chiller, a filtration system and a drain in the plumbing drawings, and a line in the budget for running it, is the system.
On the amenity floor the sauna, steam and plunge are the association’s: shared, maintained by staff, paid for in the fee. Inside the residence they are the owner’s: private, maintained by the owner, powered on the owner’s meter, and drawn into the residence’s plan at the cost of another room. The developers that put them inside the home, as Rivage states for its Wellness Penthouse, are making a design choice for a buyer who will use them daily. The buyer should know that the chiller runs on their electricity.
Where each piece sits, in the plan. What the electrical and ventilation provision is, in the specification. Who maintains what, and what it costs, in the budget or on the owner. And what the building’s rules say about wet rooms inside residences, because some associations restrict them. All four are readable before the fifteen day window closes, and the desk reads them with the buyer.
For every building it covers, the desk at Miami Dossier records what the developer states about sauna, steam and plunge, and where each sits, in the building or in the residence, with the source and the date. Rivage’s Wellness Penthouse states sauna, steam, hot tub and cold plunge in the residence, indoors and on the sunset spa terrace, per the developer’s drawings; the register says so.
This is the desk at Miami Dossier, a real estate desk covering the Miami market. It reads what developers actually build in for the body, the mind and the soul, air, water, light, heat, cold, sleep, recovery and materials, building by building, from the developer’s own documents, and keeps that record for every building it covers. Not the labels. The systems.
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This page describes thermal rooms as specifications; it makes no claim about what heat or cold does for anyone. Nothing on this page is medical, legal or investment advice, and the desk promises nothing about what any system does for any person. We give our expertise to our clients, for their benefit: contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the buildings that carry the systems you care about and what each developer actually states. Where a question is medical, legal or tax, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.