Overview
Sauna Dekor is a sauna, hammam and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor. We have built thermal areas since 1987, we are in our 40th year, and our joinery, marble and cabin work is produced in our own workshop in İkitelli, Istanbul before it ships. Projects have been delivered in more than 35 countries.
This page records the residents’ spa built at Emaar Square in the Camlica district ofIstanbul. The zones listed for the project are sauna, steam room and pool.
Scope of work
A shared spa for a residential development: a timber sauna cabin, a steam room and the wetfinishes around the pool, used by residents rather than by a supervised spa team. The packagecovered room build-up and tanking, mosaic and stone, the cabin with its heater and control, thesteam generator and head, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
Designing for unattended use
This is the decision that separates a residential spa from a hotel one. In a hotel there isalways a member of staff who knows how the rooms work; in a residential tower a family canarrive at eleven at night with children and no instruction. So the equipment is specified to besafe when nobody is watching. Heaters sit behind a guard with the correct clearances, thecontrol is outside the cabin with a maximum setpoint and a run-time limit that switches off byitself, the steam head is placed low and out of reach of any seat, and the door opens outwardswith no lock. Nothing in the room depends on a resident reading a notice. Oursauna rules page is written for exactly thisaudience.
Sizing, controls and duty cycle
Residential spa duty is bursty rather than continuous — long idle periods, then heavyevening and weekend use — which argues for equipment that reaches condition quickly andtolerates repeated start-ups. General practice sizes a cabin at roughly a kilowatt ofstone-heater output per cubic metre of volume, with additions for glazing and for masonrysurfaces, and a steam enclosure on volume with a correction for the finish plus reserve fordoor openings. A timed pre-heat, set by building management rather than by residents, is thepractical way to give a shared spa the feel of a hotel one. Seesauna andsteam room.
Tanking, acoustics and the apartments below
A wet spa inside an occupied tower carries two risks that a standalone building does not:water reaching the apartment below, and noise reaching it. Tanking is therefore not a finishdetail but the primary structural protection — bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcingtape into every corner, movement joint and penetration, dressed into the gullies, carried uppast splash height, with falls formed in the screed and epoxy grout above. Plant is isolated onanti-vibration mounts and separated from the slab, because a generator or a pump that transmitsinto the structure will be heard three floors away, and in a residential building that becomesa complaint rather than a snag.
What we solved on site
The spa sits inside a completed development, so the work had to fit around residents:deliveries through service routes at agreed hours, no cutting on site, and a sequence that keptthe corridor usable. We manufactured and dry-assembled the cabin and the stonework in ourIstanbul workshop and delivered numbered lotsmatched to the install order. Handover covered the pre-heat schedule and shutdown routine forbuilding management, not only how to switch the rooms on. Seeservices andspa contractor.
