Thermal facilities are usually planned as a list of rooms with areas beside them. That is a schedule, not an experience.
The sequence matters more than the inventory. Warm immersion, dry heat, cold, rest, repeated with decreasing intensity, is a different building from the same rooms arranged along a corridor.
Recovery is the largest room
The most common planning error is under-sizing rest. Recovery space should be planned for roughly twice the occupancy of the heat rooms it serves, because guests stay in it longer.
- —Indirect daylight only, so the body loses track of the hour
- —Acoustic separation from the wet route
- —Surfaces that stay warm to the touch
- —Sight lines that do not include other guests arriving
Get this right and dwell time rises without a single additional treatment room.