The best 2-person outdoor saunas

The Mini is the Sauna Cube cut to a couple's size: the same 45mm thermowood walls and black Katepal roof on a 1.67m by 1.2m footprint, with a 3.5kW Harvia Vega heater included. Inside there's 1.49m of bench width and just under a metre of depth, which means two people sitting up rather than lying down.

It's £4,699.99 with a wooden front and £5,499.99 with full glass. That's more than the cheapest two-seaters, and what the difference buys is the walls: thermowood at this thickness holds heat without a lining, which is why a 3.5kW heater is enough. It still needs a dedicated 32A supply, so the electrician's visit is the same as for a bigger cabin.

The cheapest proper two-seater here at £3,060, and the only one hard-wired at 16A rather than needing a 32A circuit, which keeps the electrical work small. The 3kW stove sits in a hemlock cabin 1.2m wide and 1.05m deep, with app control as well as the panel on the cabin.

The trade is heat. 3kW in thinner hemlock walls takes longer to reach sauna temperature than the thermowood cabins, and on a cold evening it works harder to stay there. At 2.3m tall it's also the tallest two-seater here, still under the 2.5m boundary limit.

The Eclipse is an outdoor infrared cabin: a black aluminium shell, a cedar interior, six full-spectrum infrared heaters, mood lighting and Bluetooth speakers. It runs at 40 to 65°C and plugs into a 32A commando socket, so there's no heater to hard-wire.

Infrared isn't a sauna in the Finnish sense. There are no stones and no steam, and the air stays cooler while the panels warm you directly, so sessions run longer at lower temperatures. If that's what you want, this is the outdoor version done properly, with a 2 year warranty and a 90-day money-back guarantee. At 1.3m by 1.1m it takes the least ground of anything here. It's currently sold on pre-order.

A short barrel in A-grade western red cedar with a 4.5kW heater included, for two people, at £3,495 direct from Fonteyn. Cedar smells the part, resists rot naturally and weathers to silver if you leave it untreated.

Barrels warm quickly because there are no corners, and the 4ft model suits a side return or the end of a narrow garden. The curve means sitting upright only, and the 4ft comes with assembly instructions rather than a fitter. If two users become four, the 6ft is £4,395 and the 8ft £4,995, and both of those are delivered and assembled.

The EMBA is a two-person cabin built from cross-laminated timber with a thermo-pine finish and a panoramic glass wall, on a 1.51m by 1.43m footprint. It's a piece of architecture more than a kit.

It's £12,995 for the cabin alone, or £14,758 with a HUUM Drop 6kW heater, controller and stones, and the black finish is now a special order. That's more than three Sauna Cube Minis. Pay it if the sauna is the centrepiece of a designed garden; otherwise the same heat costs much less elsewhere on this page.