Moroccan Bath (Morocco Bath): What the Room Has to Do

Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions engineering team, Istanbul · project and press enquiries: Alican Aykaç, Managing Partner

Last updated: 5 November 2026

A guide from Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions, an Istanbul manufacturer of saunas, hammams and steam rooms since 1987 — 40 years — with projects in 41+ countries.

The brief arrives with the ritual described in detail and the room described not at all. That is the gap this guide closes. A moroccan bath is not a decorative variant of a Turkish hammam; the 2 rooms are asked to do different things with water, and the difference shows up in the drainage drawing rather than in the tile. We build moroccan bath rooms as a turnkey contractor, so the tanking, the falls, the interceptor and the generator are 1 decision here rather than 4 trades meeting on site.

Table of contents

• What is a Moroccan bath?
• How does it differ from a Turkish hammam?
• What temperature and humidity does the room run at?
• What does black soap do to the room?
• What does rhassoul clay do to the drain?
• How is the floor drained?
• What fall does the floor need?
• What waterproofing does the room need?
• Is tadelakt a finish or a waterproofing layer?
• Where does zellij belong, and where does it not?
• How big a steam generator does the room need?
• What does hard water do to that generator?
• How much rinsing water does one guest use?
• What does the treatment slab have to carry?
• How much ventilation between guests?
• What has to be on the drawing before anyone prices it?

It is a warm, wet treatment room built around 4 steps: 10 to 15 minutes of steam at 40 to 50 °C, an application of olive-oil black soap, a scrub with a kessa glove, and a rhassoul clay mask rinsed off with warm water. The room is a piece of equipment, not decoration.

Almost every enquiry we receive describes the sequence and assumes the room follows from it. It does not. The 4 steps put 2 emulsifiers and 1 mineral clay onto skin and then wash all 3 onto the floor, at roughly 70 to 90 litres of water and 300 to 500 grams of solids and fats per guest. A room turning over 5 guests before noon therefore clears about 400 litres. That is a drainage problem wearing a spa brief.

The name itself is unstable, which is why the search data is spread across half a dozen spellings. People type morocco bath, moroccan bath, morrocan bath and hammam moroccan bath, and mean the same room. We use moroccan bath on our moroccan bath room page and treat the rest as spellings rather than different products.

The single structural difference is the centre of the room. A Turkish hammam is organised around a heated marble slab, typically 30 to 50 mm thick and warmed to 40 to 45 °C, with guests seated at individual basins around the walls. A moroccan bath has no such slab in the middle.

That absence moves the drainage. In a Turkish room the slab occupies the centre, so the floor falls outward to a perimeter channel and the wash water leaves the room at the walls. In a moroccan bath the guest is treated at low level in the middle of the floor and the water leaves at the centre, which reverses every fall on the drawing.

The second difference is what enters the water. A Turkish hammam runs on water and soap suds. A moroccan bath adds a potassium soap made from olives at pH 9 to 10 and a clay mined as a mineral, so the effluent carries both fats and 100 to 200 grams of solids per guest. Our Turkish bath detailing and our moroccan bath detailing diverge at exactly that point.

A moroccan bath runs cooler and wetter than a sauna: 40 to 50 °C of air at close to 100 % relative humidity, held for the 10 to 15 minutes the soap needs to work. A sauna at 80 to 90 °C would dry the soap onto the skin before the glove ever reached it.

The humidity is the working variable, not the temperature. Saturated air at 45 °C carries roughly 65 grams of water per kilogram of dry air, against about 10 grams at 20 °C in a corridor. Every gram of that condenses somewhere, and the room has to be built so that “somewhere” is a surface with a fall on it.

That is also why the surfaces are warmed. A wall held 2 to 3 K above the dew point stays clear; a wall 5 K below it runs. Heating the benches and the lower 1.2 m of wall is not a comfort decision in this room — it is how condensate is kept off the guest and directed to a floor that already carries a 20 mm per metre fall.

Savon beldi is a soft potassium soap made from olive oil and crushed olives, with a working pH around 9 to 10. It is applied thickly, left for 5 to 10 minutes and then rinsed, which means several hundred grams of fatty soap per guest ends up in the floor waste.

Fats and 40 °C water are a bad combination once they leave the warm room. The effluent cools in the pipe, the fatty fraction comes out of suspension, and a 50 mm waste narrows quietly over 6 to 12 months. That is why we size the run for what leaves the room, not for what a shower tray would need.

The alkaline pH matters on the finishes. Cement-based grouts tolerate 9 to 10, but polished lime plasters and some natural stones do not, and a soap film left standing on a floor is also the most common slip complaint in these rooms. The room has to be rinsable down to the drain in under 2 minutes, without a mop reaching into corners.

Rhassoul is a mineral, not a cosmetic gel. It is a stevensite clay mined in the Moulouya valley in eastern Morocco, mixed with water to a paste and rinsed off after 10 to 15 minutes. A single application is on the order of 100 to 200 grams of solid material, and all of it goes to the floor.

Clay does in a drain what clay does anywhere: it settles. In a 40 mm trap running at a shallow gradient it forms a bed rather than a blockage, so nothing appears wrong for weeks and then the whole run backs up at once. The failure is silent, which is why it is nearly always designed out rather than maintained out.

The answer is a sediment interceptor with a lift-out basket, upstream of the trap and reachable without tools. A 5 to 10 litre basket emptied weekly holds the solids from a normal treatment week. Anything that requires a contractor to open the floor will not be emptied, and the room will foul.

With a central gully that a person can open, not with a 50 mm shower waste hidden under stone. We specify a minimum 100 mm outlet, a removable grate, a lift-out sediment basket and a trap with at least a 75 mm water seal, which is the depth Approved Document H asks for on waste pipes up to 40 mm.

The gully has to sit where the water arrives. In a moroccan bath that is the middle of the room, under or beside the treatment position, so the whole floor field falls inward. Putting the gully in a corner because the drainage stack is there adds a 4 to 6 metre crossing under the finish at a gradient nobody checks.

Access is the part that gets lost. A grate that cannot be lifted by hand, or a basket that sits under a fixed bench, becomes a maintenance item nobody performs. We draw the hatch and a clear 400 mm lift-out route before we draw the stone, because 30 mm of bedded marble is what makes that route permanent.

A minimum of 2 %, which is 20 mm per metre, measured to the gully from every point in the room. In a 3.0 by 3.0 metre room with a central drain that is a 30 mm rise from the gully to each wall, and it has to be built into the screed rather than found later in the tile bed.

Anything flatter relies on evaporation to clear the floor, and in a room at close to 100 % humidity nothing evaporates. A puddle that stands after each guest is a soap film, a clay residue and a slip hazard at the same time, and it cannot be corrected once the stone is laid.

The fall also has to survive the setting-out. Large-format slabs laid on a 2 % fall distort visibly, so the floor is either laid in smaller units or cut into facets with the drain at the low point. That is a design decision, not a tiling decision, and it belongs on the drawing before the material is chosen.

A continuous bonded tanking system over the whole floor and up every wall to at least 2.0 metres, dressed into the gully flange and behind every penetration. In a room that runs at close to 100 % humidity for 4 to 8 hours a day, the tanking is the building fabric and the tile is a wear layer.

The vapour side matters as much as the liquid side. Warm saturated air migrates into any construction that is open to it, so the waterproofing plane is positioned on the warm face and the wall build-up behind it is kept vapour-tight, otherwise condensation forms inside the wall where nothing can dry.

Penetrations are where these rooms fail. Every tap spindle, bench fixing, light fitting, sensor and steam outlet is a hole through the plane, and each one needs a collar of at least 100 mm rather than a bead of sealant. We count them at drawing stage: a typical 9 m² room has 12 to 20, and every one of them is a scheduled item.

It is a finish. Tadelakt is a lime plaster, applied in 2 coats totalling roughly 10 to 15 mm, compressed and polished with a stone, then treated with olive-oil soap so that a calcium-based, water-repellent surface forms. It sheds water beautifully, and it is not a tanking membrane.

That distinction is where most tadelakt disappointments start. Sold as waterproof, it is laid over a substrate with no membrane behind it, and 2 years later the wall behind the plaster is wet. Laid over a correctly tanked and rendered background, the same material performs for a very long time.

It also needs maintenance, which has to be written into the handover. The soap treatment is renewed every 6 to 12 months, aggressive cleaning agents are excluded, and the cleaner has to stay between pH 7 and 9 to remain compatible with lime. A room handed over without that 1 page instruction sheet will be cleaned with the wrong product within 3 months.

On walls and in niches, not underfoot in the wet field. Zellij is hand-cut glazed terracotta, chiselled from fired tiles into geometric pieces roughly 10 to 12 mm thick, and its charm is exactly what makes it a poor floor in a soapy room: an irregular, glazed, grout-heavy surface.

Two properties disqualify it from the floor field. Glazed surfaces lose grip when a potassium soap film is on them, and the high ratio of grout joints gives clay something to stain. On a wall above the splash zone neither problem exists and the material does what it is there to do.

The grout line is the other schedule item. A wall with a 2 mm joint and 100 pieces per square metre carries roughly 6 to 8 metres of joint in that square metre, and every metre of it is a maintenance surface in a room where clay is rinsed off. Darker, denser grouts are specified for that reason alone.

For a tiled or stone room we size at roughly 1 kW per 1.0 to 1.3 m³ of room volume, so a 3.0 by 3.0 by 2.4 metre room of 21.6 m³ takes a generator in the 16 to 21 kW band. Stone rooms sit at the demanding end of that range because the fabric absorbs heat before the air does.

Volume alone is not the whole calculation. A 2 m² glazed screen, an uninsulated ceiling or an air-change rate above 6 per hour loses steam faster, and the generator has to replace it continuously rather than in a burst. The sizing figure is a starting point that the fabric build-up either confirms or raises by 15 to 25 %.

The generator is not our product. Steam generators come from equipment manufacturers such as Condair and EOS, and any CE marking or EN 60335 conformity on that equipment belongs to its manufacturer rather than to us. What we take responsibility for is the room, the interfaces and the commissioned result.

It decides the service interval, and the effect is not marginal. Published manufacturer data for steam plant shows the maintenance interval falling from 2,800 hours at 1 °dH to 120 hours at 25 °dH — a factor of 23, driven by nothing except the supply water the building happens to have.

In much of the Gulf and around the Mediterranean that is the single largest running-cost variable in the room. A room commissioned without softening and handed over with a 6-monthly service agreement will be descaled far more often than that, and the operator will assume the equipment is at fault.

Water treatment therefore belongs in the scope from the first drawing, together with the space and the drain the treatment plant itself needs. It is a 0.5 to 1.0 m² footprint in the plant area that is routinely forgotten and then improvised into a cupboard with no waste connection.

Roughly 70 to 90 litres. A hand shower delivering 9 litres per minute, used for about 8 minutes across the soap rinse and the clay rinse, produces 72 litres, and a filled rinsing bowl adds another 10 to 20. All of it passes through the same gully within 20 minutes.

That figure sizes 3 things at once: the hot water draw, the waste run and the interceptor basket. A treatment room turning over 5 guests in a morning moves 350 to 450 litres, which is a different order of magnitude from the bathroom the plumbing was originally designed around.

It also sets the hot water recovery. Raising 80 litres by 25 K takes about 2.3 kWh, since water stores roughly 4.18 kJ per kilogram per kelvin, so back-to-back treatments need either storage or a recovery rate that matches the booking sheet rather than the average day.

A person, the water on it and its own weight, all at once. A 30 mm marble slab weighs about 79 kg/m² on its own, so a 2.0 by 0.9 metre treatment surface is roughly 142 kg of stone before a 100 kg guest and the wash water are added.

Marble is strong in compression and weak in bending, which means the support matters more than the 30 mm. A slab bedded continuously on a masonry base performs; the same slab spanning 1.8 m between 2 supports cracks along a vein, usually 6 to 18 months after handover and always at the worst moment.

If the slab is heated, the build-up gains another layer. Heating elements sit below the stone with insulation beneath them, the surface is controlled to 40 to 45 °C, and the control sensor goes in the stone rather than in the air, because the guest feels the surface and not the room.

Enough to clear the room in 10 to 15 minutes and dry the surfaces before the next booking. Published wet-area guidance for spa environments asks for ventilation on the order of 10 to 15 litres per second for every square metre of wetted area, and a treatment room at close to 100 % humidity sits at the top of that band.

The purge is what protects the finishes. A room left saturated after the last guest keeps its surfaces wet for hours, and wet surfaces plus soap residue plus warmth is the exact condition the cleaning regime is meant to prevent. A timed over-run on the extract costs nothing and removes the problem.

Supply air is the half that gets omitted. An extract of 60 litres per second with no make-up path simply depressurises the room and pulls air from the corridor through a 10 mm door gap, which drags saturated air into the dry side of the spa. Supply and extract are drawn as a pair or neither works as intended.

Eight items, and a package missing any of them will be priced twice. The list is short: a 100 mm gully and its position, a 2 % floor fall, tanking to 2.0 m, the 12 to 20 penetrations, the 16 to 21 kW generator and its location, water treatment, the 9 litre per minute rinsing points, and the ventilation pair. Everything else is finish selection.

Those 8 decisions are what separate a room that is built once from a room that is built, opened and then closed for 3 weeks in its first year. They are also the items that cost nothing to fix on paper and a great deal to fix in stone, which is the whole argument for settling them early.

If the room joins a wider wet area, the same drawing has to name everything sharing the plant and the drainage stack. That is the first thing we settle in our spa design and installation services, before anyone chooses a tile. The history of the room, and where the ritual came from, is set out separately in our note on the history of the moroccan bath, and the heated-slab detailing that a Turkish room needs instead is covered in our note on how a hammam’s heated marble works.

Who is writing this

Sauna Dekor has designed and built wellness and thermal facilities since 1987 and is now in its 40th year, manufacturing in its own Istanbul facility with 19 employees, working under TS EN ISO 9001:2015, with projects delivered in 41+ countries. On wet areas we work turnkey: the tanking, the falls, the drainage, the stone, the plant interfaces and the commissioning.

What we do not make is equally clear. Steam generators, pumps, water treatment plant, taps and light fittings are not our products; they come from the equipment manufacturers we buy from, and any CE marking, EN 60335 conformity or TÜV Rheinland certificate on that equipment belongs to its manufacturer rather than to us. The TS EN ISO 9001:2015 certificate is ours; the rest are theirs. If you want the room drawn before it is priced, talk to our spa contracting team.