Overview
Sauna Dekor is a sauna, hammam and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor. We have built thermal areas since 1987, we are in our 40th year, and our joinery, marble and cabin work is produced in our own workshop in İkitelli, Istanbul before it ships. Projects have been delivered in more than 35 countries.
This page records the spa thermal areas at the Oran Hotel in the Laleli district ofIstanbul. The zones listed for the project are Turkish bath, hammam, sauna, pools and steamrooms.
Scope of work
A city-hotel wet circuit built into a dense historic district: marble hammam, sauna, steamrooms 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, ventilationterminals, 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 hotelspa 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 anexternal 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 theceiling rise together decide whether the hammam can be vaulted properly, and the duct routestake what is left. Working in the opposite order is what produces a hammam with a flat ceilingthat drips on its guests.
Heated marble, sauna and steam
The hammam is heated through the slab: navel stone and benches warmed from below at amoderate air temperature, with surface temperature and soak time governed by slab thickness andcircuit spacing. The dry cabin is sized by general practice at roughly a kilowatt ofstone-heater output per cubic metre of volume, with additions for glazing and for any masonrysurface inside the envelope, and specified for hotel duty — commercial heater, serviceableelements, control cabinet outside the cabin on a timer and setpoint limit. Steam enclosures aresized on volume with a correction for the finish material, then given reserve for how often thedoor opens. Product pages:Turkish bath,sauna andsteam room.
Ventilation, tanking and grout
Sauna takes supply low at the heater and extract low diagonally opposite. Hammam and steamrooms take continuous extract that runs on past closing so the rooms dry down overnight — thesingle habit that most extends the life of grout, joinery and ceilings. Every wet room wastanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tape into corners,movement joints and every penetration, dressed into the gullies and carried up past splashheight, 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.
What we solved on site
The hardest part of a project in this part of Istanbul is not the building, it is thestreet: deliveries have to arrive in small, sequenced loads at times the district can absorb,and there is no space on site to store or cut material. We manufactured, dry-assembled andnumbered the marble and the cabin in ourIstanbul workshop and delivered in lots matchedto the installation order, so nothing had to be stacked, and cutting stayed off site. More onthe approach at hotel spa design andservices.
