Overview
Sauna Dekor is a Turkish sauna and hammam manufacturer that also acts as turnkey contractor for the wet areas it builds. Founded in 1987 and in its 40th year, the company produces in its own İkitelli, Istanbul facility and has delivered thermal installations in more than 35 countries.
This page records the spa works at the NYX Hotel in Herzliya, Israel. The zones listed forthe project are sauna, swimming pool and massage rooms.
Scope of work
A compact city-hotel spa: one dry heat cabin, the pool and its surround, and treatmentrooms alongside. Small hotel spas are not simply scaled-down resort spas — they carry thesame guest expectations in a fraction of the floor area, and every decision is a tradebetween space and performance. Our package covered the sauna cabin and its heating andcontrol, the wet finishes and tanking around the pool, and the fit-out interfaces with thetreatment rooms.
Sizing a small cabin properly
The temptation in a small hotel is to fit the largest cabin the room will take and thesmallest heater that will fit it. That produces a sauna which takes an hour to come up andnever holds temperature at the top bench. General practice is to rate a cabin at around akilowatt of stone-heater output per cubic metre of volume, then add for glazing and for anymasonry wall; in a compact glass-fronted hotel cabin that addition is a large share of thetotal. Bench height matters as much as heater rating — the useful heat is in the top third ofthe room. Our Finnish saunaand sauna heater types pages coverthe layout logic.
Ventilation, and why hotels get it wrong
In a hotel the sauna is usually landlocked — no external wall, no easy route for a freshair duct — so ventilation gets reduced to an extract grille and left at that. The result is acabin that stratifies: hot and stale at the ceiling, cold at the feet. The arrangement thatworks is supply low, close to or under the heater, and extract low on the opposite side, withthe extract taken back into the hotel’s system rather than left to leak into the changingroom. Around the pool the priority is different again: enough dehumidified supply and enoughextract to keep the hall slightly negative against the dry side of the hotel, with warm airwashed across the glazing so condensation does not form where nobody can see it.
Tanking and materials in a coastal building
Herzliya is on the coast, and coastal air is salt-laden. That shortens the life of exposedmetalwork, so fixings, grilles and heater guards need to be selected for the environmentrather than by catalogue default, and any component that will be difficult to reach latershould be chosen on the assumption that it will not be replaced. Wet rooms are tanked beforefinishes — bonded membrane over the screed, taped at corners and penetrations, falls formedin the screed — with epoxy grout where the surface is permanently wet. Cabin timber iskiln-dried and low in resin, with concealed fixings so no hot metal is presented to skin.
What we solved on site
The constraint here was the ceiling void. A hotel guest floor rarely offers much spaceabove the finished ceiling, and a sauna needs both a supply and an extract route in additionto whatever lighting and sprinkler coverage the room already has. Resolving that meant fixingthe cabin’s internal height first, working the duct routes around it, and only then settingbench levels — the opposite order from the way a cabin is usually drawn. Doing it that wayprotected the top-bench temperature, which is the only part of a sauna a guest actuallyjudges. Related reading:gym and hotel sauna,hotel spa design andour services.
