A private villa steam room at The Springs, Dubai
Sauna Dekor is a sauna, hammam and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor, founded in Istanbul in 1987 and now in its 40th year, with work delivered in more than 35 countries. This project is a private villa at The Springs, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where we designed and built a single steam room, completed in 2024.
What was built
One wet-heat room, fully clad in bronze-champagne glass mosaic across walls, bench and ceiling. The bench is contoured and heated, lit from underneath by a concealed LED strip so the seat appears to float. A hand shower is fitted inside the enclosure for rinsing down. It is a compact, single-room installation — the kind of enclosure that fits into a villa’s existing wet zone rather than occupying a dedicated wellness floor.
The technical decisions behind it
Generator sizing against mosaic
Glass mosaic on a rendered core is a heavy thermal mass, and it is the reason a small room can need a generator that looks oversized on a volume calculation. We size for the enclosed volume and then upsize for the surface build-up: the first minutes of output go into warming several square metres of mosaic and render before the air begins to saturate. A generator picked from a volume table alone gives a room that takes far too long to become usable and never holds a steady cloud.
Steam inlet placement
The steam head is set low, away from the bench, behind a guard. The plume leaves the head much hotter than the room it is filling, so its position determines where the enclosure is uncomfortable. In a compact room there is little margin, which is why the inlet position is fixed at design stage and not adjusted once the mosaic is laid.
The ceiling has to fall
The mosaic ceiling is laid to a fall so condensate runs to the perimeter and down the wall. A flat ceiling in a saturated room drips onto whoever is sitting below it, and there is no ventilation strategy that corrects a flat ceiling after the fact.
Tanking, then mosaic
The build-up is an insulated core board, a bonded waterproofing membrane across floor, walls, bench and ceiling with banded internal corners, then adhesive and a grout rated for continuous wet heat. Grout is a wearing surface, not a barrier. Every penetration — hand shower, steam inlet, control, LED channel, drain — has a sealed collar formed as part of the membrane rather than drilled through it afterwards.
The lit bench is a drainage detail
Lighting a bench from below looks like a decorative decision, but it forces the right engineering: the bench has to be a formed, tanked element with a fall on its seating face and a clear shadow gap to the floor, so condensate leaves the seat instead of collecting under it. The LED channel sits in the dry side of that gap with its driver outside the enclosure.
Extract and drying
Extract runs on a timer after every session. A villa steam room that is switched off wet is where grout failure and staining start; the run-on cycle is not a comfort feature, it is the maintenance strategy.
Door and enclosure
A vapour-tight glazed door with a drip channel at the head, so water that condenses on the inside face is returned to the enclosure rather than running out into the bathroom floor beyond.
What the site required
A villa in an established Dubai community means working inside a house that is finished, occupied and served by MEP that was designed for an ordinary bathroom. The three constraints that shaped this room were the ceiling void left after the fall was formed, the drainage invert available inside the enclosure, and the electrical capacity on the existing distribution board for a steam generator. All three are surveyed before the room is drawn, because each one can change the generator selection or the enclosure size.
Related capability
See our steam room page for the room type built here, hammam for the marble equivalent, sauna for the dry-heat counterpart and shower systems for the rinse-down stage. Our Dubai page sets out how we deliver in the UAE.
