A private villa wellness suite at Dubai Hills Estate
Sauna Dekor is a sauna, hammam and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor, founded in Istanbul in 1987, now in our 40th year, with projects delivered in more than 35 countries. This page documents a private villa at Dubai Hills Estate, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where we delivered a complete wellness suite — sauna, steam room, treatment room and relaxation lounge — completed in 2025.
What was built
Four connected spaces off a single corridor. A glass-fronted sauna cabin lined in pale timber with tiered LED-lit benches, set beside a pebble bed and a bonsai planter. A mosaic steam room opposite it, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling carrying a fibre-optic starburst, a curved heated bench, a large backlit mosaic niche and a brass hand shower. A treatment room with a massage table and an illuminated planter. And a relaxation lounge with daybeds, fluted timber panelling and a backlit preserved-moss disc. The suite was photographed during commissioning with the steam room under a full steam test.
The technical decisions behind it
The corridor is the design
Four wellness rooms off a landing are four rooms. Linked by a corridor with sightlines between the lit sauna and the glass steam room, they become a sequence: heat, wet heat, treatment, rest. The corridor also does the engineering work — it holds the transition, it keeps the dry cabin’s vapour regime and the steam room’s apart, and it lets every room close on its own seal instead of opening one heat room directly into another.
Glass on both heat rooms
Both the sauna and the steam room are glazed to the corridor, which is what makes the suite read as one space at night. That is paid for at sizing: roughly 1 kW of sauna heater output per cubic metre of insulated volume plus about 1 kW per square metre of glazing, and on the steam side a generator sized for volume and then upsized for the mosaic build-up, because several square metres of glass mosaic on render absorb the first minutes of output before the air saturates.
Barrel vault and condensate
The steam room ceiling is a barrel vault, not a flat slab, so condensate runs down the curve to the perimeter instead of dropping onto the bench. Combined with a heated, contoured bench that sheds water to the floor, that is the whole condensate strategy — and neither part can be added after the mosaic is grouted.
Fibre optics and penetration count
The starburst ceiling is fibre optic, with the illuminator outside the wet envelope. In a steam room every light fitting is a hole in the waterproofing; fibre optics reduce dozens of light points to a single controlled entry. The backlit niche, the hand shower, the steam inlet, the control and the drain are the remaining designed penetrations, each with a sealed collar formed as part of the bonded membrane rather than drilled through it afterwards.
Two independent ventilation regimes
The sauna takes low supply near the heater and low extract diagonally opposite, roughly three to six air changes an hour, with a drying run-on. The steam room has its own timed extract that continues after every session. The two are not cross-connected. In a suite this size the temptation to share a duct is real and it is exactly how a dry cabin ends up being fed wet air.
The treatment room and lounge are part of the build-up
A massage room next to a steam room needs the wet room’s barrier to be genuinely continuous, because the failure will show first in the neighbouring dry finishes — the fluted timber and the moss panel. Those finishes were set out on the assumption that the tanking beside them is complete, not that it is nearly complete.
What the site required
The suite occupies a floor of a finished villa, which fixed the slab-to-slab depth, the drainage inverts and the electrical capacity before design started. The barrel vault, the ceiling fall, the fibre-optic run and the two independent extract routes all had to be resolved inside that residual depth without dropping the corridor ceiling. Commissioning was done loaded: the steam room was run up to full output and held so distribution, condensate behaviour, extract run-on and control response could be checked under real conditions rather than dry.
Related capability
See sauna, steam room and massage room for the rooms delivered here, hammam for the marble wet-heat alternative, cold plunge pools for the cold side of a suite, and Dubai for how we work in the UAE.
Frequently asked questions
What rooms make up a villa wellness suite?
In this suite: a glass-fronted sauna, a mosaic steam room, a treatment room with a massage table, and a relaxation lounge, linked by a corridor. The corridor is what turns four rooms into a sequence rather than four doors off a landing.
Why is the sauna glass-fronted if it costs more to heat?
Because in a wellness suite the cabin is also part of the room it sits in. The cost is paid at sizing — roughly a kilowatt of extra heater output per square metre of glass — and in return the suite reads as one connected space rather than a corridor of closed doors.
What is a fibre-optic starburst ceiling in a steam room?
A ceiling where the light points are fibre ends, with the illuminator and driver outside the wet room. It gives a star effect without putting an electrical fitting inside a saturated space or piercing the waterproofing at every light point.
Is a steam test part of handover?
Yes. The room is run up to full output and held so that the steam distribution, the condensate path on the ceiling fall, the extract run-on and the control response can all be checked loaded rather than dry. A steam room that has only been tested cold has not been tested.
