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 steam room and sauna built into a countryside house at Catalca, on therural edge of Istanbul. The owner is not named; the page records the district, the propertytype and the work. The zones listed are steam room and sauna.
Scope of work
A domestic thermal pair: a sealed steam enclosure with its generator, and a timber saunacabin beside it. The package covered the room build-up and tanking, the finishes, the cabinwith its heater and control, the generator and steam head, ventilation terminals, drainage andcommissioning.
Water quality is the design question nobody asks
Out of the city, a house is often on a well or a local supply rather than treated mainswater, and that matters more to a steam room than any other decision on the drawing. A steamgenerator boils water continuously; everything dissolved in that water stays behind. Hard ormineral-rich water scales the element and the vessel, and scale is the single most commonreason a domestic steam generator fails early. The remedy is to establish the water’s hardnessbefore selecting equipment, provide treatment or softening ahead of the generator, and specifya unit whose drain-down and descaling routine an owner will actually carry out. Ourhow to build a steam room guidecovers the same ground.
Sizing and sealing the enclosure
General practice sizes a steam generator on enclosure volume, applies a correction for thefinish material — stone or mosaic on a masonry backing is a large thermal mass and needs morethan the same volume over insulated board — then adds headroom for door openings. The enclosurehas to be genuinely vapour-tight, because it is under vapour pressure rather than merelysplashed: the membrane runs over screed, walls and ceiling, taped into every corner, movementjoint and penetration. The steam head sits low, away from seats, discharging into open floor,and the ceiling is coved or pitched so condensate runs to the perimeter. Product page:steam room.
The sauna beside it
The dry cabin is sized at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metre ofvolume with additions for glazing and masonry, on a dedicated circuit — three phase above amodest rating, which in a rural house is worth confirming early along with the stability of thesupply. Air enters low near the heater and leaves low on the opposite side. The cabin is aninsulated box with a continuous foil vapour barrier, a ventilated cavity and a kiln-dried,low-resin lining. See sauna andsauna versus steam room.
What we solved on site
A rural site means the services, not the joinery, are the risk: water quality, theelectrical supply and its stability, and where waste water can legitimately go. We resolvedthose before the equipment was selected rather than after, and specified components we cansupport from Istanbul, because a rural house has no local service network for a steamgenerator. Both rooms were made and dry-assembled in ourIstanbul workshop and delivered numbered.
