Overview
This is a Sauna Dekor project. We are a manufacturer first and a turnkey wet-area contractor second: cabins, benching, marble and mosaic are made in our own Istanbul workshop, then installed by our own crews. Founded 1987, 40th year, work delivered in more than 35 countries.
This project is a hammam and sauna built into a private residence in Baku, Azerbaijan. Theowner is not named; the page records the city, the property type and the work. The zones listedare Turkish bath, hammam and sauna.
Scope of work
A domestic thermal pair: a marble hammam with heated navel stone and benching, and a timbersauna cabin beside it, sharing a rinse point and a drainage route. The package covered the roombuild-up and tanking, the marble, the heating circuits, the cabin with its heater and control,ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
A domestic hammam is a heated slab
The mistake people make with a private hammam is to think of it as a tiled steam room withbetter stone. It is not: the air stays at a moderate temperature and the body is warmed byconduction from marble that is heated from below. That makes thermal mass the governingproperty. The room takes a long soak to reach working surface temperature, so in a house itwants to be on a timer that brings it on before it is wanted rather than a switch by the door;and the heating layout has to suit the slab, because circuits laid too shallow give warm andcold stripes a bather can feel through a towel while circuits laid too deep never bring thesurface up. See hammam andwhat is a Turkish bath.
Sauna sizing and ventilation indoors
The dry cabin is sized by general practice at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output percubic metre of volume, with additions for glazing and for any masonry surface inside theenvelope. In a house the electrical supply is often the real constraint: heaters above a modestrating need three phase, and the supply should be confirmed before the cabin is designed.Ventilation matters as much as output — supply low, near or under the heater, extract low onthe opposite side, ducted somewhere that can accept warm moist air rather than vented into thenext room. Without that path the cabin stratifies and the timber never dries between sessions.More at sauna ventilation.
Tanking, materials and the Caspian climate
Both rooms were tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tapeinto corners, movement joints and penetrations, dressed into the gully and carried up pastsplash height, with falls in the screed and epoxy grout above. Baku’s climate swings widely andthe Caspian puts salt in the air, so cabin timber is genuinely kiln-dried and low in resin,built with a ventilated cavity behind the lining so the back of each board can dry, and exposedmetalwork is selected for the environment rather than by catalogue default.
What we solved on site
The rooms went into an existing house, where the drainage positions and the available floorbuild-up were already fixed. We set the finished floor level from the existing gullies, tookthe falls from there, and designed the hammam build-up to the screed depth that remained ratherthan to a standard detail — which is the decision that keeps a domestic hammam from ending upwith either standing water or a slab too shallow to heat evenly. The marble and cabin were cutand dry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, thennumbered and shipped. See private spa.
