Sauna, steam rooms and jacuzzi at the Diplomatic Club in Doha
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 page records the spa and fitness thermal areas built at the Diplomatic Club in Doha,Qatar. It is a members’ club rather than a hotel, and that changes the engineering brief morethan most people expect.
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 fullwet 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 takenas a package: room build-up and tanking, marble and mosaic, the sauna cabins, the steam roomsand their generators, the surrounds to the pool and hot tub, and commissioning of the heatingand control equipment.
Why a club changes the sauna and steam room specification
A private villa sauna runs for an hour, a few evenings a week. A club sauna runs fromopening to closing, seven days, at full occupancy in the evening peak. Heaters are thereforespecified as commercial units with a duty rating and a service path; benching is built so abench top can be lifted and replaced without dismantling the cabin; and the control is lockedaway from members, timed and setpoint-limited. The same logic governs the steam generator,which in continuous service is sized on recovery rather than on room volume alone. More on ourcommercial saunaspecification page.
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 thermalrooms 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 theair moves across the benches; steam rooms get a dedicated extract that continues to run afterthe 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 vapourabove it: without enough extract and without a warm surface temperature on the surroundingglass and soffits, condensation forms where it is least visible and does its damage slowly.
Tanking, falls and epoxy grout in the steam rooms
All wet rooms were tanked before finishes: a bonded membrane over the screed, taped atcorners, movement joints and every penetration, carried up the walls above splash height anddressed into the gullies. Falls are formed in the screed. Mosaic and stone are set on a fulladhesive bed with epoxy grout in the steam rooms and around the hot tub, because cement groutin permanently vapour-loaded rooms breaks down and then telegraphs every joint. Timber in thesauna cabins is kiln-dried and low in resin, with fixings concealed so nothing hot ispresented to skin. Related product pages:steam room,sauna andpools.
What we solved on site
The difficulty on a club job of this size is rarely a single room; it is sequencing. Thethermal rooms sit at the end of a chain of other trades — structure, drainage, MEP firstfix, waterproofing, then us — and each of those has to be signed off before the next canstart, or the tanking is the thing that gets breached. Our approach was to take the wet-areapackage 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 timein Doha was assembly rather than manufacture. Our Dohapage describes how we run projects in Qatar, andservices covers the contracting model.
