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 hammam and sauna built for residences at Kaplankaya, on the Bodrumpeninsula. The zones listed for the project are Turkish bath, hammam and sauna; ourphotographic record of the job runs to nine frames across the two room types.
Scope of work
A thermal pair for a coastal residential development: a marble hammam with heated navelstone and benching, and a timber sauna cabin alongside. The package covered the room build-upand tanking, the marble and mosaic, the heating circuits, the cabin with its heater andcontrol, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
Seasonal occupancy changes the brief
A coastal residential development is not used the way a city building is. It is busy for afew months and largely empty for the rest, and rooms that are left closed up wet at the end ofa season lose grout, seals and joinery far faster than rooms that are dried and left dry. Thatturns the shutdown procedure into part of the design: extract that can be run on after the lastuse, a hammam that can be allowed to cool and dry rather than sealed hot and humid, and areopening check that is written down at handover. Equipment is chosen with the same logic —components that will sit idle for months need to be ones that tolerate it and can be servicedlocally when the season starts.
Coastal materials and salt air
Aegean coastal air is salt-laden, and that decides the ironmongery long before it decidesthe finishes: fixings, grilles, hinges, heater guards and door furniture are selected for amarine environment rather than by catalogue default, because near the sea the inexpensivefitting is the one replaced first. Timber for the cabin is genuinely kiln-dried and low inresin, with a ventilated cavity behind the lining so the back of every board can dry — in ahumid coastal climate a lining that cannot breathe will move seasonally no matter how well itwas made. See sauna andluxury home sauna.
Heated marble, air and tanking
The hammam is heated through its slab, with navel stone and benches warmed from below at amoderate air temperature; slab thickness and circuit spacing are set together, and the room isgiven a soak period rather than a thermostat chasing setpoint. The sauna is sized by generalpractice at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metre of volume with additionsfor glazing and masonry. Sauna air goes in low near the heater and out low opposite; the hammamruns continuous extract. Wet rooms were tanked before finishes — bonded membrane over thescreed, tape into corners, movement joints and penetrations, falls in the screed, epoxy groutabove — and the hammam ceiling is vaulted to shed condensate. Seehammam.
What we solved on site
Building on the Bodrum peninsula means a long supply line and a short working season, so thepackage was manufactured, dry-assembled, checked and numbered in ourIstanbul workshop, then shipped as a sequencedload with its fixings, seals and a spares allowance in the same delivery. Nothing on sitedepended on a component that would take weeks to replace, and the marble arrived alreadyreconciled with the drainage falls. More atservices.
