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 private sauna built into a residence in Brussels, Belgium. The owner is notnamed; the page records the city, the property type and the work. The zone listed for theproject is a sauna.
Scope of work
A dry-heat cabin retrofitted into an existing house: the insulated structure, internallinings and benching, the heater and control, glazing, lighting, and the ventilation andelectrical interfaces. Manufactured and dry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, then dismantledto panel sizes suited to the access route, numbered, shipped and installed.
Finding an air path in a terraced house
Brussels townhouses are narrow, deep and attached on both sides, which means most rooms haveno external wall available and the ones that do are usually the rooms nobody wants to give up.A retrofit cabin therefore has to find a ducted air path rather than a hole in a wall: supplylow, near or under the heater, extract low on the opposite side, routed to somewhere that cangenuinely accept warm moist air. The two shortcuts people take — no extract at all, or anextract into an internal room — both fail in the same way. Without a path the cabin stratifies,scalding at head height and cold at the ankles, and the timber never dries between sessions.More at sauna ventilation.
Party walls and the vapour barrier
In an attached house the wall behind the cabin is often shared with a neighbour, which makesthe vapour barrier a neighbourly obligation as well as a technical one. The cabin is built asan insulated box inside the room — insulation, a continuous foil barrier with taped laps, aventilated cavity, then the lining — so that the moisture generated stays inside the cabin andleaves through the extract rather than migrating into shared masonry. A lining fixed straightto a party wall pushes water into a structure that is only half yours.
Heat load, supply and materials
General practice sizes a domestic cabin at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output percubic metre of volume, with additions for glazing and for masonry surfaces inside the envelope.The connection is made by a local electrician to the national wiring rules — a three-phasecircuit above a modest rating — and the heater and control carry CE and EN 60335 certificationfrom their own manufacturer. Linings and benching are kiln-dried, low-resin timber withconcealed fixings so nothing hot meets skin, and bench tops lift out for cleaning. Seesauna andsauna heater types.
What we solved on site
The staircase decided the cabin. Belgian townhouse stairs are steep and turn tightly, so wesurveyed the route before manufacture, set panel sizes to it, and dry-assembled the whole cabinin our Istanbul workshop so that every joint wasproven before it was taken apart and numbered. On site the work was assembly and connection,with nothing cut in the house. Seeluxury home sauna.
