A private villa hybrid sauna at Tilal Al Ghaf, Dubai
Sauna Dekor is a sauna and spa manufacturer and turnkey contractor founded in Istanbul in 1987, now in its 40th year, delivering in more than 35 countries. This page documents a private villa at Tilal Al Ghaf, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where we built a hybrid sauna — a single cabin that runs both as a Finnish sauna and as an infrared room. Completed in 2024.
What was built
One cedar cabin with a glazed front, containing two heat sources: a floor-standing stone heater for classic dry Finnish cycles, and infrared emitter panels for low-temperature sessions. A backlit Himalayan salt brick wall runs alongside the heater and is visible through the glass door from outside. Benches are cedar with a concealed LED line.
The technical decisions behind it
Two heat sources, two control paths
A hybrid cabin is not a sauna with panels added. The stone heater and the emitters are separate systems with separate controls, and they are not run together. The Finnish mode heats the air and the mass of the room; the infrared mode heats surfaces directly and depends on the air staying cool enough for the emitters to remain the dominant source. Running both at once cancels the infrared mode and adds nothing to the Finnish one, so the control logic keeps them apart.
Where the emitters can and cannot go
Emitters face the seated position and are kept out of the convection plume that rises off the stone heater. Panels placed in that rising path get heat-soaked during Finnish cycles and end up aimed at nothing useful during infrared ones. This is the single decision that most often separates a hybrid cabin that works from one that is a Finnish sauna with panels on the wall.
Timber, and why low-emission build-up matters more here
Cedar is chosen for low resin, low conductivity and stability. But a hybrid cabin raises the stakes on the build-up itself: infrared sessions run far cooler and far longer, so a bather sits in the cabin for an extended period with their face close to the lining. We use kiln-dried timber and keep adhesives out of the cabin construction, fixing boards mechanically and from below so nothing metal is exposed on a seating face.
Salt in the dry cabin
Salt brick is hygroscopic and belongs only in a dry room. Here it sits clear of the splash zone around the heater and is built as a ventilated, drained cavity with the LED channel in the void and the driver outside the cabin, so the back of the salt has somewhere to dry to.
Heat load with glass and salt
Sizing starts at roughly 1 kW per cubic metre of insulated volume, then adds about 1 kW per square metre of glazing, with the salt wall counted alongside the glass because dense uninsulated surfaces behave like stone rather than like lined timber. A hybrid cabin has to reach full Finnish temperature reliably, so under-sizing to suit the infrared mode is not an option.
Ventilation for both modes
Low supply near the heater, low extract diagonally opposite, roughly three to six air changes an hour in Finnish use. Infrared sessions need less air movement but still need a drying cycle afterwards, so extract runs on after either mode.
What the site required
Putting two heat systems into one villa-scale cabin is a spatial problem before it is an electrical one. The emitter panels, the heater and its clearance zone, the salt wall cavity and the ventilation path all compete for the same wall area and the same slab-to-slab depth in a house that is already built. Resolving that meant fixing the bench layout, the emitter aim and the heater clearance together at drawing stage, and then prefabricating and dry-assembling the cabin in our Istanbul workshop before it was numbered, dismantled and shipped for assembly on site.
Related capability
See our sauna page for cabin and heater types including infrared and hybrid, salt room for salt as a dedicated room, steam room and hammam for the wet-heat rooms, and Dubai for how we deliver in the UAE.
