Oran Hotel

Scope of work

A city-hotel wet circuit built into a dense historic district: marble hammam, sauna, steam rooms and the pool area, taken as one package covering falls and tanking, marble and mosaic,the cabin with its heater and control, the steam enclosures and generators, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.

Working inside a constrained city building

Laleli is old, tight and busy, and that is a design input rather than a complaint. A hotel spa in a building like this is almost always in the basement, with limited slab-to-slab height,drainage that has to reach an existing stack, and no possibility of running a new duct up an external wall. The consequence is that the wet rooms are laid out from the drainage outwards:gully positions fix the falls, the falls fix the finished floor level, the floor level and the ceiling rise together decide whether the hammam can be vaulted properly, and the duct routes take what is left. Working in the opposite order is what produces a hammam with a flat ceiling that drips on its guests.

Ventilation, tanking and grout

Sauna takes supply low at the heater and extract low diagonally opposite. Hammam and steam rooms take continuous extract that runs on past closing so the rooms dry down overnight — the single habit that most extends the life of grout, joinery and ceilings. Every wet room was tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tape into corners,movement joints and every penetration, dressed into the gullies and carried up past splash height, falls formed in the screed. Epoxy grout in the permanently wet zones, because cementgrout in a vapour-loaded room breaks down and then telegraphs every joint.

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