Overview
Sauna Dekor designs, manufactures and installs saunas, hammams and steam rooms as a single contractor. The company was founded in 1987, is now in its 40th year, and works from its own production plant in İkitelli, Istanbul, with completed thermal areas in over 35 countries.
This project is an outdoor sauna with a hot tub and a cold plunge at a forest retreat onMount Ida (Kaz Daglari), Turkiye. The owner is not named; the page records the location, theproperty type and the work. The zones listed are sauna, cold plunge and hot tub.
Scope of work
A complete outdoor contrast-bathing set: a timber sauna cabin, a hot tub and a cold plunge,with the deck, drainage and services that connect them. The cabin was manufactured anddry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, then numbered, delivered and erected on site.
An outdoor cabin is a small building
Once a sauna leaves the inside of a building it acquires a roof, a facade and a foundation.It has to shed rain, resist wind, sit on something that will not move with the ground, and keepits insulation dry for years in the open. The build-up follows from that: a ventilatedrainscreen behind the external cladding so wind-driven rain can drain and dry, then insulation,then a continuous foil vapour barrier with taped laps on the warm inner side, then a ventilatedcavity, then the internal lining. The vapour barrier belongs on the inside because the cabin ishot inside and cold outside; reversing that traps moisture in the insulation. Seeour outdoor sauna guide andoutdoor sauna kits.
Laying out a contrast sequence
Contrast bathing only works if the three elements are close enough to move between barefootwithout hesitation, and separated enough that the cold plunge is not warmed by the hot tub’splume. In practice that means the plunge sits upwind or to the side rather than immediatelydownwind of the tub, the walking route between them is short, level and drained, and there issomewhere sheltered to stand between rounds. The deck is laid to fall away from the cabinthreshold, because the wettest square metre of an outdoor sauna is the one immediately outsideits door. Related reading:sauna and cold plunge andcontrast therapy.
Heat load, water and remote sites
General practice sizes a cabin at roughly a kilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metreof volume; an outdoor cabin then adds substantially, because every surface faces outdoor airrather than a heated room, and glazing adds its own loss. On a forest site the services are thereal constraint: the electrical supply available, the water source and its quality, and wherewaste water can legitimately go. Hard or untreated water shortens the life of any heaterelement and of a hot tub’s equipment, so water treatment is worth resolving at design stagerather than after the first season. Product pages:sauna andcold plunge pool.
What we solved on site
Remote sites offer short weather windows and no cover, so the cabin was built anddry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, takenapart, numbered and delivered ready to erect, with the external envelope closed early in thesequence so the insulation was never left open to weather. Foundations and deck falls were setbefore the cabin arrived rather than adjusted around it, and the plunge and tub drainage wererun to a route agreed in advance rather than improvised.
