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 hammam and sauna built for an Olympic sports complex in Turkmenistan.The zones listed for the project are Turkish bath, hammam and sauna. It is a public athleticfacility rather than a hotel or a club, and that changes almost every decision.
Scope of work
Thermal rooms for athletes and public users: a marble hammam and a timber sauna, built toabsorb continuous, high-volume use. The package covered room build-up and tanking, stone andmosaic, the heating circuits, the cabin with its heater and control, ventilation terminals,drainage and commissioning.
Designing for throughput
A hotel sauna serves a handful of guests an hour; a public sports complex serves a squadbetween sessions and then a queue behind them. The specification follows the throughput ratherthan the floor area. Bench area is maximised without compromising the height that makes the topbench work, because capacity is the whole point. Heaters and generators are chosen withsubstantial reserve, since the room is reopened and reloaded constantly and recovery is theonly performance measure that matters. And every element that will be touched thousands oftimes a week — bench tops, door furniture, handrails, guards — is specified as a replaceablepart with a known supply route, not as part of a monolithic build. Seesauna andsauna and recovery.
Hygiene and cleaning
Public wet areas are cleaned aggressively and often, which is a material specification initself. Surfaces have to tolerate repeated chemical cleaning without staining or losing theirslip resistance; joints have to be closed and coved so nothing collects in a corner that a mopcannot reach; benching has to lift out so the floor beneath it can be washed. Drainage capacityis sized for wash-down as well as for bather use, which is a larger flow than a spa gully isnormally asked to carry. Epoxy grout throughout — cement grout in a chemically cleaned publicwet room has a short life.
Air, heat and tanking
The hammam is heated through the slab, navel stone and benches warmed from below, on aschedule that brings the room on before the facility opens. The sauna is sized by generalpractice at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metre of volume with additionsfor glazing and masonry, then given reserve for throughput. Sauna air enters low near theheater and leaves low on the opposite side; the hammam runs continuous extract that continuesafter closing. Wet rooms were tanked before finishes, with a bonded membrane over the screed,tape into every corner, movement joint and penetration, and falls formed in the screed.
What we solved on site
Public buildings are commissioned to a deadline that does not move, and thermal rooms arethe last trade in. We protected the programme by manufacturing and dry-assembling everything inour Istanbul workshop, shipping as one sequencedload with spares, and installing with our own crew, so no part of the critical path depended ona local supply chain. Handover covered cleaning method and shutdown as well as operation. Seecommercial spa andservices.
