In April 2022 Erlend called Svein with an idea: they would build a public sauna in Samnanger. They were old friends who had lost touch, and neither of them saw the call as the start of a company. They just wanted a sauna.
Erlend had been living in Denmark, where he trained at Kaospilot in Aarhus (a school for making things happen) and went winter bathing with Jomsborg Winter Bathing Club. The lively, informal Danish winter-bathing culture stayed with him, and he wanted to bring it home to Norway. Svein had qualified as an architect at Bergen School of Architecture, and already as a student he had designed and built his first sauna, on a master's course taught by Marco Casagrande.
They came to the sauna from opposite directions. Erlend from the bathing culture, from the people who use a sauna to meet. Svein from the drawing board, and from the course with Casagrande he took the idea of the sauna as an intervention in place-making: a building and a meeting place at once. It is the same idea, seen from two sides. Today Erlend is the one who gets people on board and things moving, and Svein the one who knows how a sauna must be designed and built to last.
The sauna in Samnanger became Bjørkheim Sauna, and in 2023 Lokalkontoret became a company. Bjørkheim is still the ground we build on, and the proof that the idea holds in practice.
Bjørkheim Sauna. Photo: Yrjan Olsnes
Erlend Klette
managing director
Responsible for sales, process, client dialogue and systems.
Svein Serkan Erdogan
architect, head of practice
Responsible for design, building physics and technical engineering.
Andreas Thorell
contact in Sweden
Runs our pilot venture in Sweden.
Recognition
Laugarstovo in Ulvik won the 2025 Sustainability Award at the Norwegian Sauna Conference.
2025The tenders we prepare win competitions. The figures are on services.
4 of 6Samfunnsakupunktur®
All our work rests on a single idea: small, precise and reversible interventions can wake a whole community.
