Overview
Sauna Dekor is a Turkish sauna and hammam manufacturer that also acts as turnkey contractor for the wet areas it builds. Founded in 1987 and in its 40th year, the company produces in its own İkitelli, Istanbul facility and has delivered thermal installations in more than 35 countries.
This page records the residents’ spa built for the Fuzul TEM Avrasya residence developmentin the Gaziosmanpasa district of Istanbul. The zones listed for the project are Turkish bath,hammam, steam rooms, pools and sauna.
Scope of work
A full wet circuit for a residential development rather than a single pair of rooms: amarble hammam, steam rooms, a timber sauna and the pool area, so residents get the sequence ahotel spa would offer. The package covered room build-up and tanking, marble and mosaic, theheating circuits under the stone, the cabin and its heater, the generators and steam heads,ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
A hammam that runs without a spa team
A hammam is a long-soak room: heat is stored in the navel stone and the benches, warmed frombelow, and the room needs a lead time before it is usable. In a hotel a spa manager handlesthat. In a residential building nobody does, unless the design accounts for it — so the heatingis put on a schedule controlled by building management, with the room brought on ahead of theevening and weekend peaks rather than switched on by whichever resident arrives first. Thesurface temperature is limited at the control so the stone cannot be driven to a level that isuncomfortable for an unsupervised user. SeeTurkish bath andwhat is a Turkish bath.
Heated stone, sauna sizing and safety
Under the marble, slab thickness and circuit spacing are set together on the shop drawings:too shallow gives warm and cold stripes a bather feels through a towel, too deep never bringsthe surface up. The sauna is sized by general practice at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heateroutput per cubic metre of volume with additions for glazing and masonry, and specified forunattended use — guarded heater with correct clearances, external control with a maximumsetpoint and automatic run-time cut-off, outward-opening door with no lock. Steam enclosuresare sized on volume corrected for the finish, with reserve for door openings.
Tanking, acoustics and the apartments below
Every wet room was tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tapeinto corners, movement joints and every penetration, dressed into the gullies and carried uppast splash height, falls formed in the screed, epoxy grout in the permanently wet zones. In aresidential tower that membrane is the protection for the apartments beneath, so it wasinspected and signed off as a hold point before any finish went on it. Plant sits onanti-vibration mounts, isolated from the slab, because a generator heard three floors awaybecomes a complaint. The hammam ceiling is vaulted to shed condensate to the perimeter.
What we solved on site
The difficulty was fitting a genuine hammam into a residential slab depth. The room needsscreed deep enough to carry heating circuits and a ceiling with enough rise to shed condensate,and both come out of the same dimension. We set the finished floor level and screed build-upfirst, protected the ceiling rise second, and routed services around what remained. Marble andcabin were dry-assembled and numbered in ourIstanbul workshop before delivery. More atservices,sauna andsteam room.
