Overview
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 sauna and steam room built for the SW-2 block at Emaar Square inIstanbul. The zones listed for the project are steam room and sauna.
Scope of work
A per-block wellness pair rather than a single central spa: one dry cabin and one steamenclosure serving the residents of a single tower. The package covered the room build-up andtanking, the mosaic and stone, the cabin with its heater and control, the steam generator andhead, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
Why a development builds a spa per block
Splitting wellness across blocks instead of centralising it changes the engineering in a waythat is easy to underestimate. Each pair of rooms is small, which means the ratio of surfacearea to volume is high and heat losses matter proportionally more than they would in a largerroom; a cabin that is undersized on heater output will simply never satisfy anyone. It alsomeans the plant is small and distributed, so every block needs its own accessible plant space,its own drainage route and its own isolation — sharing a generator between towers looksefficient on a drawing and becomes unserviceable in practice.
Unattended operation and safety
Residents use these rooms without supervision, at any hour, so the specification assumes nostaff. The heater is guarded with the correct clearances to timber and to benching; the controlsits outside the cabin with a maximum setpoint and an automatic run-time cut-off; the steamhead is low, away from every seat and discharging into open floor; the doors open outwards anddo not lock. Lighting is rated for the room condition and positioned so that a bulb change doesnot require dismantling anything. This is the same discipline set out on oursauna rules page and onFinnish sauna.
Tanking, ventilation and finishes
Both rooms were tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed and, in the steamenclosure, over the walls and ceiling too, with reinforcing tape into every corner, movementjoint and service penetration, dressed into the gully. Falls formed in the screed, epoxy groutabove. The sauna takes supply low near the heater and extract low on the opposite side; thesteam room runs continuous extract that keeps going after the room is vacated so it dries downrather than sitting sealed and wet. Cabin timber is kiln-dried, low in resin, fixed concealed.See steam room.
What we solved on site
The constraint in a block spa is space: a small room has to hold a cabin, an enclosure, ashower point, drainage and a plant cupboard that can actually be worked in. We set the plantaccess and the drainage first — the two things that cannot be moved later — then fixed theenclosure sizes to what remained, protecting the cabin’s internal height so the top bench stayeduseful. Everything was made and dry-assembled in ourIstanbul workshop and delivered numbered, soinstallation inside an occupied building was short. More atservices.
