There is a moment, crossing the threshold at About Time Bathhouse, when sound softens and the pulse steadies. The air shifts - denser, warmer - and the outside world seems to recede. Situated just over an hour from Melbourne on Victoria’s Surf Coast, the retreat was designed in collaboration with architects Studio Goss and invites visitors into a state of calm attention. “We wanted a space that invites people to step out of urgency and into presence,” co-founder Kent Pomare says, “a place where slowing down isn’t a luxury, but a return to being human.”
Drawing on ancient bathing traditions, About Time reinterprets ritual for contemporary life. Pomare explains, “We looked to the world’s great bathing cultures more so to understand how they made people feel rather than specifically what they did or how they did it. Then we started at a feeling and that informed what we created with Australian distinctions of warmth and ease.” The result is neither onsen nor hammam but something of this southern coast - elemental and open, yet profoundly still.
Studio Goss translated that philosophy into form with restrained precision: stone, timber and steel articulated in harmony with water, heat and silence. The design moves like breath, expanding and contracting through zones of immersion and repose. “We choreographed the journey like a tide, rising and cooling,” Pomare says. “We wanted an instinctual journey where each heat experience is paced with access to cold or pause.” Light is filtered and sound subdued; the body is guided not by instruction but by intuition.
Every element speaks of restoration through balance. “Heat opens, cold awakens, steam cleanses, stone grounds,” Pomare reflects. “Each plays its part in rebalancing the nervous system and realignment.” Within this choreography of temperature and texture, rest becomes an active state - a practice of attunement.
The sensory experience extends beyond temperature to the subtleties of scent, sound and texture. “Every sense is a doorway to calm,” Pomare says. “We layered light, sound, touch and scent with intention, with subtle cues that tell the body it is safe to let go.” There is generosity in that attentiveness, an understanding that care can be architectural.
Time, too, is reimagined here. “Time stretches and softens,” Pomare says. “Instead of measuring hours, we let the body become the clock, guided by breath and instructing how we feel.” It is a radical notion in a culture of acceleration: to measure experience by rhythm rather than duration.
Yet perhaps the most profound quality of About Time lies in its invitation to relearn stillness. “Rest has become a forgotten skill,” Pomare observes. “Places like this remind us that stillness is not idleness but the foundation for a life well-lived.”
To step into About Time is to step into a kind of remembering: of water and warmth, of ritual and renewal, of the body as vessel and the mind as guest. Here, architecture becomes an act of care, and bathing, one of the oldest human practices, returns as both necessity and art.