Overview
Sauna Dekor designs, manufactures and installs saunas, hammams and steam rooms as a single contractor. The company was founded in 1987, is now in its 40th year, and works from its own production plant in İkitelli, Istanbul, with completed thermal areas in over 35 countries.
This page records the spa and wellness thermal areas at Novotel Istanbul Bomonti. The zoneslisted for the project are sauna, steam room, hammam and massage rooms.
Scope of work
A complete hotel wellness floor: a marble hammam, a steam room, a timber sauna cabin and arun of treatment rooms, arranged so a guest can move through the circuit and finish somewherequiet. Our photographic record of the job runs to thirteen frames across the four room types.The package covered room build-up and tanking, marble and mosaic, the cabin, the generator andheater equipment, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
Specifying for hotel duty
The single biggest difference between a hotel thermal room and a domestic one is that thehotel room is never off. Heaters are therefore commercial units with serviceable elements andan accessible control cabinet, sited outside the cabin, timed and setpoint-limited so a guestcannot leave the room running flat out. Steam generators are chosen on recovery: generalpractice sizes on enclosure volume with a correction for the finish material, then addsheadroom for door openings, and a hotel door opens far more often than any volume-basedcalculation implies. Benching is built in liftable sections so a damaged bench top can bereplaced without dismantling the cabin — a detail that costs nothing at manufacture and saves aclosure later. Ourcommercial saunaspecification page covers the reasoning.
Ventilation zoning across four room types
Four room types means four air regimes in one small floor plate. The sauna takes supply lownear the heater and extract low on the opposite side. The steam room and the hammam takecontinuous extract that runs on past closing so both dry down overnight. The treatment roomsmust stay dry and quiet, so they are held slightly positive against the wet circuit andseparated from the plant acoustically. Getting the pressure regime right across those zones isa coordination job with the hotel’s own ventilation contractor, and it has to be settled ondrawings before ceilings close — after that it becomes an argument rather than a design.
Tanking, falls and finishes
Wet rooms were tanked before any finish went down: a bonded membrane over the screed, tapedinto corners, movement joints and every service penetration, dressed into the gullies and takenup the walls past splash height. Falls formed in the screed, never made up in the tileadhesive. Epoxy grout in the permanently wet rooms. In the hammam the ceiling is vaulted socondensate runs to the perimeter instead of dripping. Cabin timber is kiln-dried and low inresin with concealed fixings, so nothing hot is presented to skin. Product detail onsauna,steam room andmassage room.
What we solved on site
The wellness floor sits inside an operating hotel, which turns a construction problem into alogistics one: deliveries have to come in through service routes on a schedule that does notcollide with guest movements, and noisy work has a window rather than a day. We handled it bymanufacturing and dry-assembling in our Istanbul workshop, delivering in numbered lots matchedto the install sequence, and keeping the cutting work off site. The other constraint was thehammam ceiling — vaulting it inside a hotel slab-to-slab height meant setting the dome geometrybefore the ductwork was routed rather than after. SeeIstanbul andhotel spa design.
