Overview
Sauna Dekor has been building saunas, hammams, steam rooms and wet spa areas since 1987 — this is our 40th year. We manufacture in İkitelli, Istanbul and take single-point responsibility for design, production, installation and commissioning. More than 35 countries to date.
This page records the residents’ spa at Istinye Park Residence in the Sariyer district ofIstanbul. The zones listed for the project are steam room, sauna and pools; the photographicrecord shows an indoor pool hall alongside the thermal rooms.
Scope of work
A residential wellness floor built around an indoor pool hall, with a timber sauna and asteam room off it. The package covered the wet-area build-up and tanking, stone and mosaic, thecabin with its heater and control, the steam generator and head, ventilation terminals,drainage and commissioning.
The pool hall is the building risk
An indoor pool inside a residential tower is not primarily a water-treatment problem; it isa building-physics problem. Water evaporates continuously, the vapour finds the coldest surfacein the hall — normally the glazing or an under-insulated soffit — and condenses there, out ofsight, for years. The remedy is a dehumidified supply air system, extract enough to hold thehall slightly negative against the residential side of the building, and warm air deliberatelywashed across the glass. If the hall is allowed to go positive, that moist air migrates intolobbies, lift cores and eventually apartments, which is a far more expensive fault to correctthan to prevent. Seeindoor swimming pooland pools.
Thermal rooms for unsupervised use
Residents use the sauna and steam room without staff present, so the rooms are specified tobe safe unattended: guarded heater with the correct clearances, control outside the cabin witha maximum setpoint and an automatic run-time cut-off, steam head low and away from every seat,outward-opening doors without locks. Sizing follows general practice — roughly a kilowatt ofstone-heater output per cubic metre of cabin volume with additions for glazing and masonry, anda steam enclosure sized on volume with a correction for the finish and reserve for dooropenings. A timed pre-heat run by building management gives the rooms a usable evening peak.
Tanking, acoustics and finishes
Wet rooms were tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tapeinto every corner, movement joint and penetration, dressed into the gullies, carried up pastsplash height, falls formed in the screed, epoxy grout in the permanently wet zones. In a towerthis is structural protection, not decoration. Plant is isolated on anti-vibration mounts andkept off the slab, because pumps and a generator that transmit into the structure are audiblein apartments and become complaints rather than snags. Slip resistance and the wet-to-dry floorthreshold around the pool are specified together.
What we solved on site
The wellness floor sits inside a completed residential building, so the constraint wasworking around occupancy: service-route deliveries at agreed hours, no cutting on site, and asequence that kept circulation open. Everything was manufactured and dry-assembled in ourIstanbul workshop and delivered in numbered lots.Handover covered the pre-heat and shutdown routine for building management. More atservices,sauna andsteam room.
