On a recent Tuesday, the heat index in Frisco, Texas, spiked above 100 degrees. While asphalt bubbled beneath a scorching sun, Katelin Schebler was relaxing on a bench in a room that resembled a stylish meat locker. Swaddled in a robe, mimosa in hand, she was writing in her journal under a gentle snowfall.
“It’s a nice storm, not a blizzard,” Schebler, a co-owner of a high-end spa, said by phone from her custom indoor igloo. “Something you’d want to enjoy.”
To the list of improbable follies now available for the wealthy, let us add the snow room.
As the changing climate wreaks havoc on the four seasons, some people with means are fashioning their own. They are equipping their homes (and even their yachts) with indoor winter wonderlands, aided by companies like the Italian snowmaker TechnoAlpin, which blasts snow onto ski mountains, and an American company, the Spa Butler.
A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna — a cavelike space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.
In recent years, these frosty cold rooms have become a choice amenity for those atop economic Everest. The petrochemical billionaire Mukesh Ambani had one installed in Antilia, the skyscraper in Mumbai, India, that his family calls home. The 440-foot superyacht Serene, owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, also has one.
A decade ago, when the technology to create indoor snow was in its beta phase, snow rooms were a novelty flex for the ultrarich. Sara Brenninger, a TechnoAlpin marketing director, said the company “had to learn how a snow cannon could be used in different ways.”
It turned out that blasting a slurry of frozen water and compressed air onto a ski run is one thing. Transforming part of a home or a boat cabin into a miniature tundra is quite another.
“We had to learn at this early stage not only how to create snow indoors, but how to cool down the ambience, how the snow stays there,” Brenninger said.
In devising the snow room aboard the Serene, the designer Pascale Reymond took style cues from the yacht’s owner at the time, the liquor magnate Yuri Shefler, who was said to have wanted a reminder of his subzero homeland in the uplands of central Russia.
Whether this “Doctor Zhivago” feature sold Bill Gates on the boat is unknown, but he did once fork over a reported $5 million per week to charter the yacht for a family outing. Upgrades to the Serene’s snow room were undertaken when the yacht was acquired by the Saudi prince, who reportedly keeps it chilled to 12 degrees Fahrenheit and had it programmed to produce snow showers at a computerized cue.
These days, snow rooms are becoming routine offerings in shipyard salesrooms, said Kevin Kramer, a broker at Burgess Yachts in Aspen, Colo. “Back in the day, yacht design was all about drinking and partying and lot of bars,” he said. “Now the focus is very much on fitness and longevity.”
Snow rooms, he added, are in line with a broader spa trend favoring alternating hot-and-cold therapy. “An ice plunge has a smaller footprint and is a much easier thing to engineer,” Kramer said. “But snow rooms are a form of one-upping at the tippy-top.”
Gradually, and perhaps inevitably, snow rooms have lately made their way into the lives of anyone willing to spend $130,000 or more to create a scene from “Bambi” in their own homes.
Scores have already been built or are under construction across the United States, said Tyler Slater, a co-founder of the Spa Butler in Plano, Texas. “We do them in rock, luxury marble, wood, whatever you can imagine,” he said. The Spa Butler created the snow room for Katelin Schebler and her husband, Jon, at their spa in Frisco.
“We’re currently working with a gentleman in Ohio who wanted a snow room with rugged features — split logs and wood, the rustic look,” Slater said. “Basically, we can produce any fantasy you want. Think of it as Disneyland with snow.”