Overview
Sauna Dekor has been building saunas, hammams, steam rooms and wet spa areas since 1987 — this is our 40th year. We manufacture in İkitelli, Istanbul and take single-point responsibility for design, production, installation and commissioning. More than 35 countries to date.
This page records the spa thermal areas at Hyatt Regency Izmir. The zones listed for theproject are Turkish bath, hammam, sauna and steam rooms; the photographic record shows a marblehammam with kurna washing basins alongside the sauna and steam rooms.
Scope of work
A hotel thermal suite built around a marble hammam, with a dry sauna cabin and steam roomscompleting the circuit. Our package covered the room build-up and tanking, the marble andmosaic including the kurna basins and their supply points, the sauna cabin with its heater andcontrol, the steam enclosures and generators, ventilation terminals, drainage andcommissioning.
Kurna basins set the geometry
In a traditional hammam the kurna — the marble basin a bather washes at — is not anaccessory added at the end. Its position fixes the bench lengths either side of it, theclearance a bather needs to sit and pour, the run of the hot and cold supplies behind the wall,and the direction of the floor falls. Setting the basins late means either the falls or thestone layout has to be compromised, and both are visible for the life of the room. We setkurna and gully positions first, resolved the falls against them, and only then cut the slabs.More on the room type atthe history of the hammam.
Heated stone, heat load and dry cabins
The hammam is heated through its slab: navel stone and benches warmed from below at amoderate air temperature, with the surface temperature and the soak time set by slab thicknessand circuit spacing. The sauna is the opposite regime. General practice rates a commercialcabin at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metre of volume, with additionsfor glazing and for masonry surfaces, and in a hotel the heater is specified as a commercialunit with serviceable elements and a control cabinet outside the cabin, timed andsetpoint-limited. Steam enclosures are sized on volume with a correction for the finish, plusreserve for door openings. Seesauna andsauna heater types.
Ventilation and tanking
Three room types, three air regimes. Sauna: supply low at the heater, extract low anddiagonally opposite so air crosses the benches. Steam rooms and hammam: continuous extract thatruns past closing so the rooms dry down overnight, which is what keeps grout, joinery andceilings alive over years. All wet rooms were tanked before finishes — bonded membrane over thescreed, reinforcing tape into corners, movement joints and every penetration, dressed into thegullies and carried above splash height, with falls formed in the screed and epoxy grout above.The hammam ceiling is vaulted so condensate runs to the perimeter rather than dripping ontobathers.
What we solved on site
Hotel spas are almost always tight on slab-to-slab height, and a hammam is the room thatsuffers first, because it needs both a screed thick enough to carry heating circuits and aceiling with enough rise to shed condensate. Those two demands come out of the same dimension.We fixed the finished floor level and the screed build-up first, protected the ceiling risenext, and let the ductwork be routed around what remained — the opposite of the usual sequence,but the only order that leaves a hammam working as a hammam. Marble and cabins weredry-assembled and numbered in ourIstanbul workshop before delivery. More athotel spa design.
