Overview
This is a Sauna Dekor project. We are a manufacturer first and a turnkey wet-area contractor second: cabins, benching, marble and mosaic are made in our own Istanbul workshop, then installed by our own crews. Founded 1987, 40th year, work delivered in more than 35 countries.
This project is a marble hammam built into a private residence in Istanbul. The owner is notnamed; the page records the city, the property type and the work. The zones listed are Turkishbath and hammam.
Scope of work
A domestic hammam: heated navel stone, heated marble benching, a washing point and thedrainage and ceiling geometry that make the room work. The package covered the room build-upand tanking, the marble, the heating circuits and control, ventilation terminals, drainage andcommissioning.
The room is a heated slab
A hammam does not work like a steam room. Air temperature stays moderate; the body is warmedby conduction from marble heated from below, at a humidity high enough that the skin does notdry out. That makes thermal mass the governing property and produces two consequences. First,response is slow — the room takes a long soak to reach working surface temperature, so in ahouse it belongs on a timer that brings it on ahead of the evening rather than on a switch bythe door. Second, the heating layout has to suit the slab: circuit spacing and slab thicknessare chosen together, because circuits laid too shallow give warm and cold stripes a batherfeels through a towel, while circuits laid too deep never bring the surface up. Seehammam andwhat is a Turkish bath.
Ceiling geometry and the washing point
In a room held near saturation, condensate forms on the ceiling continuously. A domed orvaulted soffit runs it down the curve to the perimeter; a flat one drips it on the bather. In ahouse, where the available height is fixed, a shallow vault or a pitched soffit does the samejob as a full dome. The kurna washing basin sets the rest of the geometry — bench lengths, theseated clearance needed to pour, the supply runs behind the wall and the direction of the floorfalls — so its position and the gully position are fixed before the marble is cut.
Tanking, falls and materials
The room was tanked before any stone was laid: bonded membrane over the screed and up thewalls above splash height, reinforcing tape worked into every corner, movement joint and pipepenetration, dressed into the gully, with falls formed in the screed rather than made up in theadhesive bed. Epoxy grout throughout the wet zone, because cement grout in a room this humidgives up and then telegraphs every joint. Marble is book-matched on the faces seen from thedoor, and extract runs continuously and keeps running after use so the room dries down. Seemodern hammam.
What we solved on site
The constraint was the floor build-up available in an existing house. A hammam needs screeddeep enough to carry the heating circuits and falls that reach the existing gully, and both comeout of the same dimension. We set the finished floor level from the gully, worked the falls, anddesigned the heated slab to the depth that remained rather than to a standard detail. Themarble was cut in our Istanbul workshop againstthe drainage drawing, so it arrived already reconciled with the falls. Seeprivate spa.
