Kemerburgaz private villa sauna, Istanbul 2026
Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions designed, manufactured and installed the Kemerburgaz private villa sauna in a private villa in Kemerburgaz, Istanbul, completed in 2026. It is a compact Finnish sauna in ayous, built around one large round porthole window that looks out onto an ivy-covered wall, with two tiers of floating benches, warm LED light and an EOS heater and EOS control panel. The 7 photographs on this page are of the finished room.
Project facts: Completed 2026 · Kemerburgaz, Istanbul, Türkiye · Scope: sauna design, manufacture and installation · Timber: ayous cladding, benches and floor · Equipment: EOS heater and EOS control panel
What was built in the Kemerburgaz villa
One dry-heat sauna room with 2 bench tiers along the side wall. The walls are clad in vertical ayous boards and the ceiling and floor are slatted in the same timber. The room opens through a glass door with brass hinges and a turned wooden knob, under a horizontal-slat transom.
Outside the door, an EOS control panel is mounted on the wall at hand height.
A round porthole window with a deep wooden reveal
The room is built around 1 large circular pane set in a deep reveal lined with short ayous boards that follow the curve. The opening reads as a porthole cut through a thick wall rather than a framed hole, and it frames an ivy-covered wall outside.
On a sunny afternoon a disc of daylight moves across the slatted floor.
Glass stores almost no heat, so a window is part of the heater sizing from the start rather than something added after it. The rest of the cabin is insulated so the heater only has to make up for the one glazed opening and the glass door.
Two-tier floating benches with warm LED light
Both of the 2 bench tiers are carried off the wall with no legs, so the slatted floor runs clear underneath and can be cleaned in one pass. Warm LED strips sit above and below the slatted backrest and under the upper bench, so the light sources stay out of sight from every seat.
EOS heater behind a wooden guard, EOS control outside
The EOS heater is wall-mounted in the corner beside the window, behind a slatted wooden guard with 3 horizontal rails that keeps a passing body away from the hot casing. The sauna stones rest in the heater’s own metal tray on top, and a wooden bucket stands on the floor for water.
The EOS control panel is mounted outside the room next to the door, so the temperature is set and read without opening the cabin. On the day of the photographs it showed about 80 °C, the lower end of the 80–100 °C range of a traditional Finnish sauna.
A glass door under a slatted transom
A full-height glass door on 2 brass hinges lets the porthole be seen from the corridor and keeps the compact room from feeling closed. It closes with a turned wooden knob, because inside a hot cabin the handle a hand closes on should be timber rather than metal.
Above the door, horizontal ayous slats fill the wooden frame up to the ceiling line.
How this project relates to our other sauna work
We have built 2 other recent villa saunas worth comparing. In Istanbul we also built the gable-roof sauna in a private villa, where the window follows the roof pitch instead of a circle. For a cabin with a full glass front, see the panoramic sauna in a private villa in Dubai.
Our guide to types of sauna heaters explains wall-mounted units like this one, our guide to sauna timber compares ayous with other woods, and our projects archive lists the rest of our delivered work. Founded in Istanbul in 1987, Sauna Dekor has 40 years of manufacturing, a team of 19 and 5,000+ projects in 35+ countries.
