A private waterfront villa sauna and hammam on Jumeirah Bay Island
Sauna Dekor manufactures and installs saunas, hammams and steam rooms as a single turnkey package, from Istanbul, since 1987 — our 40th year — with delivery in more than 35 countries. This project is a private waterfront villa on Jumeirah Bay Island, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, completed in 2025.
What was built
A sauna and a wet room, entered from a shared corridor through etched glass doors. The sauna is a salt cabin: backlit Himalayan salt brick panels flank a floor-standing stone heater, the benches are contoured with a lounger position, the ceiling carries a log-slice timber panel, and a window looks out to the garden. The wet room is finished in white marble, with a carved kurna basin, a heated bench and a seahorse mosaic panel set in a niche above the basin.
The technical decisions behind it
Salt panels in a dry cabin only
Backlit salt is specified for the dry Finnish cabin and never for the marble wet room. Salt brick is hygroscopic; put it in a saturated environment and it will not survive. Inside the sauna the panels are set clear of the direct splash zone around the heater and built as a ventilated, drained cavity with the LED channel in the void and the driver outside the cabin, so the back face of the salt can dry.
A garden window has to be paid for
The window is what makes this cabin worth sitting in, and it is also the largest single load in the room. Sizing runs at roughly 1 kW per cubic metre of insulated volume, then adds about 1 kW per square metre of glazing, and here the salt panels are counted alongside the glass, because dense uninsulated surfaces behave far more like stone than like a lined timber wall. Toughened safety glass, timber frame, compression seal.
Contoured benches
A lounger position changes the bench engineering. The support has to carry a distributed load rather than a seated one, the profile is worked so that no fixing sits under a shoulder or a hip, and every board is fixed from below so no metal reaches skin. The timber is kiln-dried and low-resin for the same reason.
The log-slice ceiling moves
End-grain timber expands and contracts differently from board stock. The ceiling panel is therefore carried on a frame that lets individual pieces move, rather than being fixed rigidly across the ceiling where a season of cycling would open joints. Behind it, the ceiling’s vapour-tight layer runs unbroken.
One membrane behind two finishes
The wet room mixes marble slab, mosaic panel and a carved basin. The materials are not the risk; the joints between different substrate systems are. A single continuous bonded waterproofing membrane runs behind all of them, with banded corners and sealed collars at the basin feeds, the waste, the hand shower and the lit niche.
Heated bench in zones
The heated bench runs on its own circuit, independent of the room’s other heating, so the surface a bather actually rests on can be set separately. Marble is specified low-porosity and sealed.
Ventilation, kept separate
The sauna takes low supply near the heater and low extract diagonally opposite, with a drying run-on after use. The wet room has its own timed extract. The two systems are independent — sharing a duct between a dry cabin and a wet room is a slow way of ruining the cabin.
What the site required
The shared corridor is the design device that makes the suite work: it holds the transition between hot and cool, it keeps the two vapour regimes apart, and it lets each room close on its own seal instead of opening one heat room directly into another. On a completed island villa the practical constraints were the ceiling void left after the wet room’s fall was formed, the drainage invert available for the basin and floor waste, and the supply capacity for the sauna heater. The cabin was prefabricated and dry-assembled in Istanbul before shipping, so on-site work in a finished house was assembly rather than fabrication.
Related capability
See sauna and hammam for the two room types here, salt room for salt as a room in its own right, steam room for the mosaic wet-heat alternative, and Dubai for how we work in the UAE.
Frequently asked questions
Can a sauna have a window to the garden?
Yes, and it is one of the better things you can do to a small cabin, but the glazing has to be paid for in the heat calculation — roughly a kilowatt of extra heater output for every square metre of glass — and it must be toughened safety glass set in a timber frame with a compression seal.
What is a log-slice ceiling panel?
A ceiling made from end-grain sections of timber rather than boards. It is a decorative and acoustic surface; because end grain moves differently from long grain, it is set on a frame that lets each piece move rather than being fixed rigidly across the ceiling.
Why put the sauna and steam room off a shared corridor?
Because the corridor becomes the transition. It gives somewhere to cool down between rooms, it keeps the two vapour regimes physically separated, and it lets each room have its own door seal rather than opening one heat room directly into another.
Is a mosaic panel in a marble steam room a problem?
No, provided the mosaic and the marble share one continuous waterproofing membrane behind them. The risk in mixed finishes is never the materials; it is a joint where two different substrate systems meet and the tanking is interrupted.
