Overview
This is a Sauna Dekor project. We are a manufacturer first and a turnkey wet-area contractor second: cabins, benching, marble and mosaic are made in our own Istanbul workshop, then installed by our own crews. Founded 1987, 40th year, work delivered in more than 35 countries.
This page records hotel spa work at the Grand Millennium in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. The zoneslisted for the project are sauna, swimming pool, hammam and a flotation pool.
Scope of work
A city hotel spa is a set of rooms that has to work as a sequence: a warm wet room, a hotdry cabin, water to cool in, somewhere to lie down. Here it runs from the hammam through thesauna to the pool hall, with a mosaic-linedflotation pool as the still, high-density water element. That pool is worth naming precisely,because it is often confused with a modern sensory-deprivation tank: it is a tiled, walk-inpool, not a pod. The pod product sits on a separatesensory deprivationtank page, and the dry cabin type on oursauna page.
Heat, water and how the rooms are sized
Hotel thermal rooms are sized for the guest count the spa is licensed for, not for the floorarea. As general practice a dry cabin is rated at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output percubic metre with an addition for glazing and for masonry surfaces, while a steam or hammam roomis sized on the generator’s ability to recover after a door opening rather than on volume alone.In a hotel the door opens constantly, so recovery decides whether guests call the room good. Thehammam differs again: navel stone and benches are heated from below through the slab, so theroom has a long warm-up and must be brought on before the spa opens.
Ventilation and the pool hall
The pool hall is the piece of a hotel spa that most often fails, and it fails as a buildingrather than as a pool. Warm water evaporates constantly; the vapour finds the coldest surfacein the room, which is usually the glazing or a poorly insulated soffit, and condenses there.The remedy is dehumidified supply air, enough extract to hold the hall slightly negativeagainst the dry side of the hotel, and warm air washed across the glass. The thermal roomsaround it get their own treatment: sauna supply low near the heater with low extract opposite,hammam and steam with continuous extract that keeps running after closing so the rooms drydown overnight.
Tanking, stone and mosaic
Every wet room was tanked before finishes — bonded membrane over the screed, taped atcorners, movement joints and penetrations, dressed into the gullies, and taken up the wallspast splash height. Falls formed in the screed. Mosaic and marble set on a full bed withepoxy grout in the permanently wet rooms. In the hammam the ceiling is domed or vaulted socondensate runs down the curve to the perimeter instead of collecting and dripping; a flatsoffit over a hot wet room will always rain on the guests eventually. Ourhammam andindoor swimmingpool pages carry the product detail.
What we solved on site
Working in Iraqi Kurdistan means treating logistics as a design input. Anything that hasto be corrected after delivery costs weeks rather than days, so the marble, the cabins andthe mosaic panels were set out, dry-assembled and numbered in our Istanbul workshop beforeshipping, and the shipment was planned as a single sequenced load rather than a series ofpart deliveries. That is also why the specification favoured components with a long servicelife and an obtainable spare — a heater or a generator that cannot be serviced locally hasto be one we can support from Istanbul. Ourhotel spa design page describes how weplan this kind of scheme, andcommercial spa the specification approach.
