Overview
Sauna Dekor builds thermal areas end to end — design, manufacture, installation and commissioning under one contract. The company started in 1987, is in its 40th year, manufactures in İkitelli, Istanbul, and has completed projects in over 35 countries.
This page records the spa at the Ferko Ilgaz Mountain Resort Hotel in Türkiye. The zoneslisted for the project are Turkish bath, hammam, sauna and a shock bucket.
Scope of work
A mountain resort thermal suite: a marble hammam, a timber sauna and a shock bucket for thecold reaction between rounds. The package covered the room build-up and tanking, the marble andmosaic, the cabin with its heater and control, the cold-side installation and its drainage, theventilation terminals and commissioning.
Building a thermal suite in a cold climate
A mountain hotel changes two things. First, the building is cold for much of the year, so athermal room starts from a lower ambient and both the sauna and the hammam take longer to reachcondition than the same rooms in a city hotel. That is a scheduling matter for the operator asmuch as a sizing matter for us: the hammam in particular, being a heated slab, needs its soakperiod built into the daily routine. Second, the insulation and vapour detailing around therooms matter more, because the temperature difference across the cabin envelope is larger.A continuous vapour barrier with taped laps behind the lining is what keeps that differencefrom driving moisture into the surrounding structure.
The cold side: shock bucket detailing
A shock bucket looks simple and is the fitting most often installed badly. It needs a watersupply that can refill it quickly enough for the next guest, a fixing substrate that will takethe dynamic load of a full bucket tipping, and — most importantly — floor falls and a gullydirectly beneath it sized for the whole volume arriving at once. A floor laid to a general fallwill not clear that. It also needs to sit where a guest can reach the cord without standing inthe splash zone of the person before them. Related product pages:shock bucket,ice fountain andsauna and cold plunge.
Heat, air and tanking
Sauna sizing follows the general rule of roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubicmetre of volume, with additions for glazing and masonry, and in a resort the heater is acommercial unit with serviceable elements and an external, setpoint-limited control. Airfollows room type: sauna supply low at the heater with low extract opposite; hammam withcontinuous extract that runs past closing so the room dries down. Wet rooms were tanked beforefinishes — bonded membrane over the screed, tape into corners, movement joints andpenetrations, falls in the screed, epoxy grout above. The hammam ceiling is vaulted to shedcondensate to the perimeter.
What we solved on site
Seasonality is the operational problem at a mountain resort: the spa runs hard in season andthen stands idle. Rooms left closed up wet at the end of a season lose grout, seals and joineryfar faster than rooms that are dried down and left dry, so the commissioning handover coveredshutdown as well as operation — how to run the extract on after the last guest, how to leavethe hammam, and what to check before reopening. The marble and cabin were dry-assembled andnumbered in our Istanbul workshop beforedelivery to site. See hotel spa design.
