My path to Coba started over a decade ago during my time in the health and wellness industry.
I was one of two employee wellness coordinators at a major Denver hospital, helping build a holistic health program for the doctors, nurses, and staff. Meditation, movement, nutrition, sleep. You name it, we were probably offering it. I loved that work. But I kept hitting the same wall: I was almost always meeting people in crisis, and crisis is a hard place to start. Everything took longer, and while the work was rewarding, we could only get so far in one-on-one or small group sessions. The deeper work seemed to stay just out of reach. I was eager to create a bigger impact, faster, with larger groups of people.
While digging into how to help hospital teams find more cohesion, I stumbled upon the science of flow: the state where the noise in your head quiets, your attention locks in, learning speeds up, and change actually sticks.¹ What grabbed me even more was the research on group flow, what happens when a whole room of people drops into that state together.²
At the same time, I was working a side gig at a sensory deprivation center here in Denver, so I was floating a lot. During one of those sessions, something happened that I still can’t fully explain. In the dark and the quiet, I saw myself build a bathhouse. The whole thing, from the front door to the smallest detail. I stood back to take it in, complete, and then jolted back to the physical world, awake and aware. It’s still one of the most vivid experiences of my life. I couldn’t explain it then, and I’ve never been able to forget it. I got out of that tank knowing I had to pursue it.
Meanwhile, the research kept pointing somewhere familiar. A little adrenaline. Something new. A moment of awe.³ Impactful music and sound. Other people. In other words, everything I’d been doing my whole life as a hobby. The art, the music, and the design work I did on nights and weekends wasn’t a side thing. It was the toolkit.
So with the research in one hand and that vision in the other, I made a bet and went all in.
I didn’t know how to build a bathhouse yet, so I started with what I knew. For over a decade, I built spaces designed to bring people together: music venues, nightclubs, festival stages, sculpture, immersive brand experiences, interiors and furniture made to bring a room to life. Every project was different. The intent never changed: you walk in, your energy comes up, wonder takes over, and the space carries you somewhere you couldn’t get on your own.
And it worked. Night after night, I watched it work. People would find me at events and tell me what was opening up for them. Sometimes total strangers shared the most personal revelations of their lives, real clarity about who they wanted to become.
Then I’d see them the next day, and they wouldn’t remember.
The experience was real. The setting was the problem. Too late, too loud, too clouded by whatever was in their glass. By morning, whatever they’d touched was gone. That broke my heart more times than I can count.
Around that same time period, I was handed another powerful lesson. My design and fabrication company, Radia Studios, was clearing out a building for a project, and we made a run to the local landfill. I didn’t think much of it until we crossed over the hill and drove down into the site itself: more than one hundred acres of compacted trash, a crater so deep there was no telling how far down it went. A machine bigger than anything I’d ever seen rolled across it on spiked drums, flattening old televisions like they were nothing. Gulls circled overhead, picking through the layers. I stood there doing the math. How many craters like this exist? What is seeping into the earth beneath them? And the fact I couldn’t look away from: every piece of trash I had ever created ended up in a place exactly like this. I left that site in a kind of mourning that lasted for weeks.
Then the mourning turned into fire. The Japanese have a word, mottainai, for the grief of watching something useful go to waste, and I had finally felt it all the way through. I rebuilt our entire practice around it. Reclaimed materials whenever possible. New materials only when they’re built to last. Nothing single-use. That commitment became something our studio is known for, and I’m deeply proud of it. But it also taught me a harder truth: no matter how visibly we lived those values, many people didn’t notice, and plenty didn’t care. Clients couldn’t understand why we would reuse a beautifully made structure instead of ordering a cheap disposable one. And I couldn’t really blame them. Nobody gets argued into caring. I certainly wasn’t. I had to stand in that crater myself. People wake up through direct experience, or not at all.
Those two lessons circle the same truth, and they’re why I am driven to bring Coba into existence. People have real awakenings and lose them, because the setting can’t hold them. And people can’t take in what matters most, because a concept pushed at you will never land the way lived experience does. Both point to the same answer: build the environment. A place where people can reach those states clear-headed, healthy, and present enough to keep what they find. A place where we get out of our own way, and can finally hear.
Turns out, that kind of place has been around for thousands of years.
For most of human history, the bathhouse was the gathering place. People got clean, sure, but they also told stories, worked out ideas, processed whatever the community was going through, met friends, made plans, and occasionally fell in love. It was where a society took care of itself. And at the center of it all, a practice that works today exactly like it always has: heat, cold, rest, repeat. Thermal bathing shifts your state honestly, no substance required, and then sets you down somewhere warm, calm, and human, where you can actually go deep. And actually remember.
That’s the difference that changed everything for me. A festival happens once a year, far from your real life. A bathhouse can be a weekly ritual, ten minutes from your front door. What you process there, you keep. What you learn there, you carry home. The experience doesn’t end when the night does. It gets woven into who you are.
The state of the world was part of why I started this work. It’s even more of why I’m doing it now. In the ten years since I began, people have only gotten more isolated, more guarded, more overwhelmed. We’re surrounded by each other and starving for real connection: to each other, to ourselves, to something larger than ourselves. I’ve never been more certain that we need spaces that can hold us through times like these. Places to restore, to heal, to be inspired, to process, and to remember how much we belong to one another, to ourselves, and to this earth.
That’s what I was creating when I met Memphis. He’d brought me into his Denver home to create custom artwork and installations, including an immersive room, and what started as a commission became a friendship built on long conversations about the same obsession: spaces that inspire people and take them somewhere deep. Somewhere in those conversations, Coba stopped being an idea and became a decision. The bathhouse I saw in that tank all those years ago finally had a name.
Every material at Coba, every curve, every lounge, every degree of heat and cold, every note of sound and quality of light is designed with deep intention: to bring people together and carry them somewhere potent. And because Coba gets to be part of your regular life, what you find here doesn’t fade by morning. You keep it. You build on it. You come back next week and go a little deeper.
Building a place that brings people together, and at the same time holds space for the quiet inner work, is one of the great dreams of my life. Getting to build it alongside extraordinary people, in a city I love, is the greatest honor of my career.
All those years ago, I watched this bathhouse come to life with my eyes closed. Soon, I’ll get to watch it come to life for real, with you in it.
Notes & further reading
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. See also van der Linden, D., Tops, M., & Bakker, A. B. (2021). “The Neuroscience of the Flow State: Involvement of the Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine System.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12:645498.
Sawyer, R. K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Basic Books.
On awe quieting self-focus and increasing connectedness: Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899; Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). “The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept.” Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944–963. On novelty and arousal as flow triggers, see van der Linden et al. (2021), above.