Overview
Sauna Dekor is a Turkish sauna and hammam manufacturer that also acts as turnkey contractor for the wet areas it builds. Founded in 1987 and in its 40th year, the company produces in its own İkitelli, Istanbul facility and has delivered thermal installations in more than 35 countries.
This page records the spa built for the Victory Hotel in Istanbul. The zones listed for theproject are Turkish bath, hammam, sauna, pools and a fitness and sport centre.
Scope of work
A hotel leisure floor rather than a thermal suite on its own: the hammam and sauna sitalongside a pool and a fitness area, which means the wet and dry parts of the floor sharewalls, services and an air system. Our package covered the wet-area build-up and tanking, themarble and mosaic, the sauna cabin with its heater and control, and the finishes anddetailing around the pool hall.
Where wet meets dry
The interface between a pool hall and a gym is the detail that decides whether a hotelleisure floor ages well. Warm, moist air from the pool will migrate into any adjoining spacethat is at lower pressure, and a gym is full of surfaces — mirrors, upholstery, electronics —that do not tolerate it. The rule is to keep the wet side slightly negative and the dry sideslightly positive, and to make sure the lobby between them is not treated as a spare corner ofone system or the other. Getting that pressure regime agreed early, with the hotel’s ownventilation contractor, avoids the slow, invisible damage that shows up years later.
Heated marble, sauna sizing and controls
The hammam is heated through its slab, with navel stone and benches warmed from below and along soak before opening. The sauna is sized by general practice at roughly a kilowatt ofstone-heater output per cubic metre of volume, plus allowances for glazing and masonrysurfaces, and specified as a commercial unit with serviceable elements. In a hotel where thesauna sits next to a gym, the control matters more than usual: it goes outside the cabin, on atimer with a maximum setpoint, so a cabin cannot be left running at full output by a guest whohas moved on to the treadmill. Seegym sauna andfitness and sport centre.
Tanking, falls and finishes
Wet rooms were tanked before finishes: bonded membrane over the screed, reinforcing tapeinto corners, movement joints and every penetration, dressed into the gullies and carried uppast splash height, with falls formed in the screed rather than in the adhesive bed. Epoxygrout in the permanently wet zones. Around a pool, slip resistance and the transition betweenwet and dry floor finishes are specified together, because that threshold is where guests walkbarefoot from one condition into another. The hammam ceiling is vaulted so condensate runs tothe perimeter. Product pages:Turkish bath andpools.
What we solved on site
On a shared leisure floor the hardest thing to protect is the tanking, because it is laidearly and then worked over by every other trade — a bracket fixed through a tanked wall isenough to undo it. We handled this the way we handle it everywhere: the wet-area package satwith one contractor, and the tanking was signed off as a formal hold point with the maincontractor before any finish was allowed on top of it. The marble and cabin were made anddry-assembled in our Istanbul workshop anddelivered numbered. See services.
