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 project is a sauna built into a city apartment in Amsterdam. The owner is not named;the page records the city, the property type and the work. The zone listed for the project is asauna.
Scope of work
A compact dry-heat cabin for a city home: the insulated structure, linings and benching, theheater and control, glazing, lighting, and the ventilation and electrical interfaces with thebuilding. Made and dry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, then dismantled to panel sizes thatwould pass the building’s stair, numbered, shipped and installed.
Bench geometry is what makes a small cabin work
In a small sauna the temptation is to take floor area from the benches to make the room feelbigger. That is the wrong trade. The useful heat sits in the top third of the cabin, so theupper bench height relative to the ceiling is the single dimension that decides whether theroom satisfies anyone. A compact cabin therefore keeps the upper bench high and deep enough tolie on, keeps enough headroom above it to sit upright, and takes the space it needs fromcirculation instead. Getting that order right is why two cabins of identical footprint can feelcompletely different. SeeFinnish sauna andhow to choose a home sauna.
Loading, acoustics and the neighbours
An apartment adds constraints a house does not. The cabin, its heater and its stones are aconcentrated load on a slab shared with other homes, so the loading is confirmed beforeanything is ordered. The fan, the contactor and the door all make noise that carries through ashared structure, so the cabin is isolated from the slab and the control gear is positionedwhere its switching is not audible next door. And the moisture the cabin generates has to leavethe apartment rather than migrate into a party wall — which makes the extract route a designdecision rather than an afterthought.
Heat load, supply and build-up
General practice sizes a cabin at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metreof volume, with additions for glazing and masonry. In a city apartment the supply to the unit isusually the binding constraint — above a modest rating a heater needs a three-phase connection,made by a local electrician to the national wiring rules. The cabin is an insulated box:insulation, continuous foil vapour barrier with taped laps, ventilated cavity, then kiln-dried,low-resin lining with concealed fixings and lift-out bench tops. Air in low at the heater, outlow opposite, ducted into a route that can accept warm moist air. Seesauna ventilation.
What we solved on site
Amsterdam apartment stairs are famously steep and narrow, and they, not the room, decidedhow the cabin was made. We surveyed the access route first, set the panel sizes to it, thenbuilt and dry-assembled the whole cabin in ourIstanbul workshop so that every joint was provenbefore it was taken apart. On site the work was assembly and connection, quiet and dust-free,with nothing cut in the building. Seeprivate spa.
