Now, this is a way to spend a birthday and a way to introduce my trip to Denmark! AIRE Ancient Baths is a chain of spas and I’ve had my eye on the one in London for quite a while. Never got round to it because I want to do the evening bath and I either haven’t had an evening or I’ve balked at the price. But I was spending my birthday in Denmark for reasons I’ll explain on Thursday and I decided I can justify it for a birthday.
Other than a couple in Spain which are in old Moorish souks and palaces and one in a country house, AIREs are housed in old industrial buildings, with vivid blue pools and mood lighting and candles weaving through a labyrinth of rough, raw brick walls. They each have half a dozen different baths which have Latin names because the USP is that these aren’t the same sleek modern spas you find everywhere, they’re ancient ones. Or at least, they’re sleek modern ones inspired by ancient baths. If you saw my post about the Roman Baths in Bath, you’ll know that one of my far-off dreams is to open a modern Roman-style bath, so apart from the fact that I love this sort of thing and wanted to take the opportunity to spend my birthday at the one in Copenhagen, I also wanted to know how good a job AIRE has really done of making you feel like you’re at a Roman bath.
Copenhagen is a city of three faces. Trying to write the first draft of this post over a month before I even got on the plane, I realised that I needed to write a little of the history between Reykjavik and Copenhagen, so that’s one face – Denmark as Nordic colonial power. The second is Copenhagen as the capital of a modern Nordic country, one which is both leaps & bounds ahead of the rest of the world in happiness and feminism and all that and also cold, dark, damp and icy, a country where a long winter is a time to be survived, probably while wearing something chunky and practical. The third face of Copenhagen is one I see mostly when I open the special Instagram I use to follow lifestyle influencers, where Copenhagen Fashion Week is up there with Paris, Milan and New York, where beautiful people in beige boxy clothes drift around with deliberately bored faces pretending to eat pastries (that they wouldn’t actually ever put in their mouths for fear of spoiling those beautiful bodies). Going to an upmarket spa like this feels like the third Copenhagen. It makes me want to pack a suitably beige and expensive outfit into my Ryanair hand luggage specifically for the spa, so I can take some pictures leaning on the red brick of the old Carlsberg building where it’s housed.
But I’m not one of those beautiful people, I don’t own expensive beige outfits and I’m flying Ryanair without 8 oversized suitcases, so here’s my best attempt at one of those kinds of pictures:
You’re not allowed to take photos inside, because it’s a spa (“the place where [disconnection] finds you”, complete with the brackets and italics) so the rest is going to have to be illustrated directly from their own Instagram.
I arrived on a hot July day after a fifteen-minute walk from Enghave Plads via the Netto in the square just outside. The Carlsberg district is weird – I think they do still brew Carlsberg there but the old red brick brewery is now part spa, part hotel and part Italian restaurant and I suppose the new development around it is supposed to fit in with the vibe but everything just looks so new and pristine and… well, soulless. There are a handful of people walking up the street, the occasional car or bike, but it feels deserted. Maybe it’s just before 4pm and everyone’s still at work and I’ve just stumbled across a genuinely residential area that isn’t flooded with tourists but it felt a bit like a ghost town.
The entrance to AIRE is in the side of the building, under the arch and not in the square behind it where Google Maps implies it is. I found a couple of doors with the AIRE logo over them and one was open because of the heat but when I peeked in, there were a couple of computers and a lot of black drapes and it felt very much like the back door. So, through the hotel next door (wondering if the spa belonged to the hotel and I’d find the entrance in there) where I realised that there’s a front door. If there’s a hotel front door, there’s probably an AIRE front door! Signs say the entrance is round the corner and there it is, under the arch. By this point, I’m not feeling terribly spa-like – I’m hot, I’m stressed, I’ve tried to break into a spa…
Anyway, once you get inside, it’s all dark and candlelit. The person on reception checks your booking and I’d done the online check-in so all she needed to do was give me a wristband and tell me where to find the changing rooms where my attendant would meet me and show me round. So, down the stairs, follow the DAMEN sign and I’m in the changing rooms. My attendant showed me to a locker – in theory, there’s no difference between one and another except that some have been prepared for the next guest with the robe, towel and slippers neatly arranged in there whereas some haven’t. My attendant showed me to one of the prepared lockers and explained that I’d need to put on my swimwear and the robe but to leave the towel for later and when I’d done that, she’d come back. In fact, she didn’t go anywhere. I know the job is partly to show visitors where everything is and partly to keep the changing rooms clean and dry and the lockers stocked but getting changed is very offputting when you know someone’s lingering nearby. I was under the impression she was lingering to give me a guided tour of the spa area but in fact, the next bit was “the showers are through there and then you can go through to the pools” which could have gone into the “here’s your locker and here’s what you need to take” speech. I liked the slippers, by the way. No cardboard-and-towelling things that fall apart the second water touches them; these were proper little 2mm neoprene booties with the AIRE logo on them. You wear them at all times, not just between the pools but in the water. That feels very weird.
I had my shower – shampoo, conditioner and shower gel are provided – and then you go through the black door marked THERMA and you’re in the pool area. Just like I’d seen in the pictures on the website, it’s very dark. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust and a map would have been handy, even if it was just on the website for me to get an idea of the layout in advance because at first, I could only see the one pool and no obvious way to any of the others. There are lots of candles – I dread to think how long it takes someone to light them every morning and to go round extinguishing them at night, especially as a lot of them are only reachable by physically getting into the water.
I started in the tepidarium, which is the coolest of the pools, although they call it the warm pool rather than the tepid one when they use English. In the photos, the pools look like a bright pale blue glowing in the dark but in fact, they’re white, with a few LEDs below water level to make them glow and the reason they look so blue is just the contrast with the yellow-orange light of the candles.
This is definitely Cool Girl Copenhagen. Well, the neoprene booties are a bit dorky, especially in the pool, but relaxing by candlelight in a dark industrial building definitely feels more like the sort of thing the beautiful beige pastry & coffee girls might do. I know spas are far from unique to Copenhagen and even AIRE is an international chain but it fits that side of the city. Dua Lipa might even come here – oh, more on Dua Lipa’s guide to Copenhagen in a later blog!
So I sat in the tepidarium to get my bearings. I knew I’d want to come back in there but once my eyes had adjusted to the candlelight, it was time to scramble out and investigate the rest of the place. Find the other pools. There were steps leading out of the pool at the opposite end and that went into a little chamber with the pediluvium in it, the footbath, which is unique to the Copenhagen branch. It was out of order. It’s a sunken trough filled with large white pebbles and you walk through it, contrasting hot and cold water. There’s a similar but much smaller thing at the Nové Lázně in Mariánské Lázně.
In the next chamber was the caldarium, the hot water bath. I have to remind myself than the cald- prefix comes from the same Latin origin as things like the Spanish calor or the French chaud, meaning hot rather than the Norse – because we’re in Denmark – kald meaning cold. And the caldarium was hot. My feet, in those neoprene sockies full of tepid water, didn’t immediately notice the heat as I waded in but the rest of me did. It’s the sort of heat where you have to do a long, controlled breath rather than plonk yourself straight in.
At each end of the caldarium were the frigidaria, the cold plunge pools, also out of order. These I knew about in advance because I’d had an email. I could either defer my booking for sometime in the next year but preferably after September or I could have extra time in the baths to make up for the missing cold pools. It was my birthday and I wasn’t planning to be back in Denmark anytime soon and honestly, how much time am I going to spend in the cold plunge pools? Extra time in the hot pools? Yes please!
Opposite the caldarium was the vaporium, aka the steam bath. Now, that was working but it has a large… I don’t know what the right word is, a big stone bucket in the middle, like the thing that a fountain would sprout out of in the streets. According to the pictures on the website, that’s usually full of water but that also had an “out of order” sign on it. I don’t personally feel like the vaporium suffered too much from its lack; it was definitely steaming and definitely smelled of something – eucalyptus, maybe. As per the sign outside the door (which I had to peer at like an old lady to read in the half-darkness) I had a shower before continuing my exploration.
At the end of the baths is the flotarium, the salt bath. This is quite a comfortable temperature and you’re supposed to float in it, using the bars at each end to tether yourself to the side so you don’t go headfirst into someone or something but I didn’t notice it either being particularly salty or any more conducive to floating than anywhere else. I liked it, though. I especially liked sitting in it. I’d been in Copenhagen a week at this point and I was either walking around, sitting on a train or lying on my bed in my “apartment”. At no point had I had the opportunity to really curl up on the floor and it turns out contorting my legs like that is a thing I have to do every now and then.
And right back at the beginning, behind a door that had put me off exploring it when I first arrived, was the balneum, the thousand jets bath. The doors, presumably, are to muffle the noise of those thousand jets but the whole room feels just a little out of character with the rest of the place. Everywhere else is lit by golden candlelight with the occasional LED in the water to make the pools glow. This room is lit by a single candle and otherwise illuminated by a hint of light coming through the blocked out windows and the several LEDs glowing in the pool. It’s definitely a cold light rather than the warm light everywhere else. It also actually is a lot colder than the other pools and you have to steel yourself to step in after coming back from the caldarium. Who needs a frigidarium when you’ve got the balneum?
I’d gone for the Baths at Different Temperatures package which gives you 90 minutes to enjoy the baths rather than any of the packages with spa treatments or expensive chocolates (which feels like the wrong thing to eat in hot water) but it was bumped up to two and a half hours for lack of frigidarium and that wasn’t a bad amount of time to spend in there. Obviously, I could stay for hours and hours but I could also feel that I’d done everything and relaxed sufficiently after just two and a half. I would have liked to have brought my sketchbook in the water – the darkness and the golden and blue lights are delighful but this is also the bones of the old brewery. There’s a lot of raw brick and over the tepidarium is a line of old concrete hoppers and a length of pipework. I don’t know that the arches linking the chambers are necessarily authentic but if you don’t think about it too much, it’s a very atmospheric place for a bath. I’ve been to a lot of spas and hot water experiences in my time and while some go for the sleek and shiny approach, lots of others do go for the more stripped-back approach. It usually involves bare concrete rather than old bricks and I quite like the more industrial style.
As for the dark, once you’ve got used to it and got your bearings, it’s quite relaxing. Unless you’re sitting in a certain spot in the tepidarium where you can see the staff by the bar – or at least, by the shelf with the list of drinks prices – because the faces peering out of the blackness are quite creepy. I had a good look at the most of the candles to see if they’re real or if they’re LED fakes and they do seem to be real. I spent a lot of time staring at the massive church candles beside the tepidarium before finally peering inside them to find they are indeed real candles but completely hollowed out and with smaller candles in jars inside to create the flickering effect. I know my bathroom in a 90s newbuild with white tiles is never going to look like a real spa and I know I made some changes to make it feel more like Belgium’s Thermes de Spa (purple LEDs in the bath, strings of lights on the windowsill and over the towel rail, plus a pile of new, soft and non-white towels) but I really began to consider getting some giant church candles and hollowing them out and then melting the scraps into jars. Ha. I don’t have the space literally anywhere in the bathroom for a candle the size of a cellar cheese block and anyway, I’m not a candle person. It’s fine inside a brick brewery but I’d be constantly just a little worried about setting the house on fire.
So, the two main questions: did it feel ancient? No. Despite the candles and the brickwork and the dark, it feels like a modern sleek spa. It’s very nice – it’s very nice – but it doesn’t for a second feel like you might actually be a Roman. Would I go back again? Huh. I liked it. I very much liked it. I absolutely didn’t dislike it. But it feels expensive for what it is. Aqua Sana’s twilight session is about the same price as AIRE’s baths only session but it’s four hours long compared to (normally) an hour and a half. Also, there’s an Aqua Sana an hour from home whereas the nearest AIRE is in central London, which would take three or four hours to get to, depending on whether I drive or take the train. So it’s a no-brainer, even if Aqua Sana isn’t quite as serene and beautiful. Because AIRE is gorgeous. It’s genuinely quiet and peaceful (except in the balneum) and it’s lovely. It’s everything I want in a spa. But it’s expensive! Sometimes you’ve got to be more financially realistic and I’m more a Center Parcs chaos spa girlie than an ancient baths spa girlie.
(And now I have to go and have a proper spa-bath in my 90s bathroom in an attempt to wash the taint of the word “girlie” off myself.)