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 project is a hammam and sauna wellness suite inside a private villa in the EmiratesHills master community, Dubai. The owner is not named; the page records the district, theproperty type and the work.
Scope of work
The zones recorded for this villa are a hammam and a sauna, arranged as one suite so the tworooms share a wet lobby, a rinse point and a single drainage route — the most commonprivate-villa brief we receive in Dubai. Our contract covered the room build-up rather than theequipment alone: screeds and falls, tanking, marble and mosaic, the cabin, heating and control,ventilation terminals and commissioning.
Choosing the heater and sizing the heat load
For a villa sauna of this class we specify an electric stone heater rather than an infraredemitter, because a hammam-and-sauna pairing is built around water: only a stone-mass heaterlets the bather ladle. General practice sizes a domestic cabin at roughly one kilowatt ofoutput per cubic metre of volume, plus an allowance for glazing and for masonry walls. We donot publish this project’s rating, because the correct figure follows the built dimensions; ifyou are specifying your own, our note onsauna heater types sets out thesame arithmetic, and Finnishsauna covers the cabin type.
The hammam is the opposite problem. Nothing in it is heated by air: the navel stone and thebenches are warmed from below, so the design question is surface temperature. Thick stone isslow and forgiving; the circuit is laid to suit the slab thickness, and the room needs a soakperiod before the first guest rather than a thermostat chasing setpoint.
Ventilation and moisture control
Ventilation is where villa wet rooms are most often got wrong. A sauna wants fresh air low,near or under the heater, and extract low on the opposite side, so air sweeps across thebathers instead of short-circuiting to the ceiling. A hammam wants the reverse — continuousextract that runs on after the room empties, because what damages a building is the moistureleft behind at midnight. Here we drew make-up air from a conditioned internal corridor ratherthan the façade: Dubai outdoor air is hot and carries salt and humidity, and putting itstraight into a thermal room fights the equipment. Seesauna ventilation.
Tanking, falls and materials
Under the marble the room is tanked as a pool would be: a bonded liquid membrane over thescreed, carried up the walls above splash height, with reinforcing tape worked into everycorner, movement joint and pipe penetration. Falls are set in the screed, not made up in theadhesive bed. Grout is epoxy in the wet zones, because cement grout in a steam-loaded roomeventually gives up. Marble is book-matched on the faces visible from the door; the cabin iskiln-dried, low-resin timber with no glued laminates where a bather touches. Product detail onourTurkish bath andsauna pages, andhammam Dubai covers the local market.
What we solved on site
The suite went into a villa that was already finished and occupied, so the work had to beplanned backwards. The binding constraint was the floor-to-ceiling height left once tanking,screed falls and underfloor heating had taken their share; the hammam ceiling was resolved asa shallow vault, so condensate runs to the perimeter instead of dripping off a flat soffit, andthat vault had to fit the height remaining. Cabin and marble were dry-assembled in Istanbul,numbered and shipped, so time inside the house was installation, not fabrication. SeeDubai.
