Sedra Community Villa Riyadh — Sauna & Hammam

A private villa sauna and hammam in Riyadh

Sauna Dekor is a sauna, hammam and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor. We were founded in Istanbul in 1987, we are in our 40th year, and we have delivered thermal rooms in more than 35 countries. This page documents a project in a private villa in the Sedra community, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where we designed, manufactured and installed a Finnish sauna and a marble Turkish hammam as one connected thermal suite. The suite was completed in 2024.

What was built

Two heat rooms sit side by side in the villa’s wellness floor. The hammam is finished in marble, with a heated navel stone — the göbektaşı — set under a circular cove-lit ceiling. The sauna is a dry Finnish cabin lined in pale timber, with tiered benches, twin wall lamps and a floor-standing stone heater in the corner.

Both rooms were delivered on the single-contractor model we use for every private villa suite: the cabin, the waterproofing, the heating equipment, the controls, the lighting and the ventilation come from one supplier. That removes the interface gap where villa thermal rooms usually fail — the joint between the joinery package, the MEP package and the tiling package, where each trade assumes another one sealed it.

The technical decisions behind it

Heat load and heater class

We size a private cabin at roughly 1 kW of heater output per cubic metre of insulated volume, then add about 1 kW for every square metre of glass, stone or other uninsulated surface in the envelope. Those surfaces do not store heat the way a lined timber wall does; they re-radiate it and pull the room’s recovery time out. For a villa room of this class that normally lands in the mid single-digit kilowatt band.

A floor-standing stone heater was used rather than a wall-hung unit. A floor-standing body carries a deeper stone charge, and the depth of that charge is what decides how the steam behaves when water is thrown — a shallow charge gives a short sharp burst, a deep one gives a slower, rounder release. It also needs a guard and a defined clearance zone, which has to be drawn into the bench layout rather than resolved on site.

Ventilation

Fresh air enters low, near the heater, so incoming air is drawn up through the convection plume. Extract sits diagonally opposite, also low, on the far wall, giving roughly three to six air changes an hour during a session. Just as important is what happens afterwards: an extract run-on cycle dries the cabin once bathers leave. In a hot dry climate the thing that ages a cabin is not the heat, it is moisture left standing in the timber overnight.

Hammam substrate and waterproofing

The hammam is built up as a system, not as a finish. Screed laid to fall, a rigid board or masonry core, then a bonded waterproofing membrane carried up the walls with banded internal corners and sealed collars at every pipe penetration, then a tile adhesive and grout rated for continuous wet heat. A hammam almost never fails at the visible marble; it fails at the junction between the horizontal and vertical planes, and at the point where a pipe passes through the tanking.

Heated marble

The navel stone and the perimeter benches run on separate heating circuits, so the göbektaşı can sit warmer than the seats a bather rests on. Marble is specified low-porosity and sealed. The cove ceiling geometry is not only decorative — a curved or domed ceiling moves condensate to the perimeter instead of letting it drip onto the bather below.

Timber

Cabin linings and benches are kiln-dried, low-resin timber — Ayous and alder are the usual choices for a villa cabin because they stay comfortable to touch at operating temperature. Bench boards are fixed from below so no metal fastening is exposed on a seating face, and cladding floats on battens over a vapour-tight layer with a ventilated cavity behind it.

What the site required

Riyadh is a dry inland climate with dust and a large day-to-night temperature swing, and that changes one decision in particular: the cabin’s fresh-air intake is taken from a conditioned internal corridor rather than pierced through an external wall, so the room is not pulling dust and summer outside air into its own supply.

The villa was already structurally complete, which is the normal condition for this kind of work in the Gulf. Our answer is to build first and travel second: the cabin is prefabricated and dry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop, checked, numbered, dismantled and shipped, then reassembled on site. That compresses the wet and dusty trades inside a finished house down to the minimum.

Related capability

See our sauna and hammam pages for the room types used here, our steam room page for the wet-heat alternative, and our Riyadh page for how we deliver in Saudi Arabia. Scope, engineering, installation and after-sales are set out under services.

Frequently asked questions