Diplomatic Club Spa & Fitness

Scope of work: sauna cabins, steam rooms, the jacuzzi and the pool hall

The zones recorded for the project are pools, sauna, spa hot tub and steam rooms — a full wet circuit rather than a single cabin. Our photographic record of the job runs to a dozenframes across the pool hall, the sauna, the jacuzzi and the steam rooms. The work was taken as a package: room build-up and tanking, marble and mosaic, the sauna cabins, the steam rooms and their generators, the surrounds to the pool and hot tub, and commissioning of the heating and control equipment.

Sauna and steam room air in the Gulf climate

Doha’s outdoor air is hot and humid for much of the year, so make-up air for the thermal rooms is taken from the conditioned side of the building rather than straight from outside.Sauna cabins get supply low, near the heater, and extract low and diagonally opposite, so the air moves across the benches; steam rooms get a dedicated extract that continues to run after the last session, because the room has to be dried down before the building is left overnight.Around the pool and hot tub the governing risk is not the water in the vessel but the vapour above it: without enough extract and without a warm surface temperature on the surrounding glass and soffits, condensation forms where it is least visible and does its damage slowly.

What we solved on site

The difficulty on a club job of this size is rarely a single room; it is sequencing. The thermal rooms sit at the end of a chain of other trades — structure, drainage, MEP first fix, waterproofing, then us — and each of those has to be signed off before the next can start, or the tanking is the thing that gets breached. Our approach was to take the wet-area package as one responsibility so the interfaces were ours to manage rather than the client’sto arbitrate, and to prefabricate the cabins and the marble in Istanbul so that on-site time in Doha was assembly rather than manufacture. Our Dohapage describes how we run projects in Qatar, andservices covers the contracting model.

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