Overview
Sauna Dekor has been building saunas, hammams, steam rooms and wet spa areas since 1987 — this is our 40th year. We manufacture in İkitelli, Istanbul and take single-point responsibility for design, production, installation and commissioning. More than 35 countries to date.
This page records the sauna and steam room built for the Concorde Resort spa in Kyrenia,Cyprus. The zones listed for the project are sauna and steam room.
Scope of work
A resort thermal pair: one dry cabin and one wet room, sharing a rinse point and adrainage route. Our photographic record of the job runs to seven frames across the two rooms.The package covered the room build-up, tanking and falls, finishes, the sauna cabin with itsheater and control, the steam enclosure with its generator and steam head, ventilationterminals and commissioning.
Commercial duty, not domestic equipment
The difference between a resort thermal room and a good home one is duty cycle. A resortcabin is on from the moment the spa opens until it closes, at high occupancy in the evening,seven days a week through the season. We therefore specify commercial-rated stone heaterswith serviceable elements, controls sited outside the cabin with a timer and a maximumsetpoint, and benching built so a single bench top can be lifted and replaced without takingthe cabin apart. The steam generator is chosen for recovery rather than nominal output: theuseful question is how quickly the room returns to condition after each door opening, and ina resort the door opens continually. Ourcommercial spa page covers thespecification approach.
Sizing, ventilation and the season
General practice sizes a dry cabin at roughly a kilowatt of heater output per cubic metreof volume, with additions for glazing and for masonry surfaces, and sizes a steam enclosure onvolume with a correction for the finish material — mosaic on masonry stores far more heatthan the same volume on insulated board and needs a proportionally larger generator. Airfollows the room type: sauna supply low at the heater with low extract diagonally opposite;steam room extract running on past closing so the enclosure dries down overnight. In aMediterranean resort there is a third factor — seasonality. Rooms that stand idle out ofseason need to be dried and left dry, and the commissioning handover should include how toshut the rooms down properly, not just how to run them.
Tanking, grout and finishes
Both rooms were tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tapeworked into corners, movement joints and every service penetration, dressed into the gully andcarried up the walls above splash height, with falls formed in the screed. Epoxy grout in thesteam enclosure — cement grout in a permanently vapour-loaded room breaks down and thentelegraphs every joint. The sauna is built as an insulated box with a continuous foil vapourbarrier behind a ventilated cavity, lined in kiln-dried, low-resin timber with concealedfixings. Product pages:sauna andsteam room.
What we solved on site
The coordination problem in a resort spa is that the thermal rooms are the last trade inand the first to be blamed. Tanking is laid by us but can be breached afterwards by anyonefixing a bracket through a wall; drainage is set by others but has to receive our falls. Wehandled it by taking the wet-area package as one responsibility — falls, tanking, finishes,cabins, generators and commissioning — so the interfaces were ours to manage, and by holdingthe tanking inspection as a formal stage with the main contractor before any finish went on.More on the model at services andspa contractor.
