Local contractor Kevin Born is looking to take advantage of the recent change in San Francisco law allowing adult bathhouses to exist again, and he has plans to create a luxury version of a bathhouse in a two-story building he owns on 12th Street in SoMa.

Born, who owns and operates Ashbury General Contracting & Engineering and is a part owner of the Midway nightclub, has submitted plans to the city for Maze SF, a new, upscale gay bathhouse that he hopes to create inside a two-story building at 40 12th Street — a few blocks from the SF Eagle, and a half block south of Market Street.

As Born tells the SF Business Times, Maze SF would be "elevated," open 24 hours a day, and would be "unapologetically queer." As he explains it to the publication, "This isn’t your daddy’s old bathhouse with plywood walls painted black. You’ll feel like you stepped into the Four Seasons Spa."

The move to open a bathhouse comes five years after openly gay supervisor Rafael Mandelman first proposed rolling back the local ordinance that, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, outlawed gay bathhouses for both political and public health reasons. Prior to that 1984 ordinance, enacted under Mayor Dianne Feinstein, gay bathhouses had proliferated across San Francisco, with many of them concentrated in and around SoMa.

The new ordinance finally passed in November 2024, and there's been some movement on the bathhouse front, with two nascent projects appearing to be on the hunt for space and backers, Castro Baths and New Bathhouse.

"By 2020, with treatments for HIV and PrEP and a whole lot of knowledge that it no longer made sense, and from a public health perspective, we could do better by allowing bathhouses and regulating them," Mandelman said last year.

Currently, there still are no proper queer bathhouses in SF — which are defined by rentable rooms with lockable doors, in addition to showers and spa elements — only the pseudo bathhouse/sex club Eros in the Tenderloin, and the more traditional, non-sexual bathhouse Archimedes Banya. Steamworks in Berkeley is the closest actual queer bathhouse that's still in business.

But Born hopes to change that — and, interestingly, he identifies as straight, but has had plenty of gay friends over the years and knows a business opportunity when he sees one. He plans to hire a full-time operator to manage the business, once construction is complete.

Per the Business Times, the permit applications details call for a maze-like design, with lounge spaces upstairs, and "multiple rooms for patrons to engage in sexual activities or watch other patrons engaging in sexual activities."

He's also reportedly been doing market research by surveilling how many people go in and out of Steamworks on a daily basis — he says it's between 250 and 350 per day. And there's definitely an untapped market on this side of the Bay among gay men who wouldn't venture to deepest Berkeley for that sort of thing.

Currently there's no timeline for when Maze SF might open, and city approvals for the project are still to come.