Sauna, Steam Room & Hammam in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

International Invoicing

Contracts and invoicing structured for Saudi projects — international invoicing in USD or EUR, with a single point of contact throughout.

Saudi-Compliant Engineering

Every installation is engineered to the Saudi Building Code 2024 — SBC 401 (Saudi Electrical Code) and SBC 801 (Saudi Fire Protection Code), issued by the Saudi Building Code Center — SASO and SABER conformity, and General Directorate of Civil Defense fire-safety standards.

In-House Manufacturing

From 3D design and technical documentation to custom marble and sauna timber in ayous and pine — one team from concept to handover, backed by a 24-month warranty on workmanship and manufacturing; 24-month manufacturer's warranty on electrical and mechanical equipment; 5-year warranty on structure and waterproofing.

SBC 2024, and the committee is now a centre

The current basis is the Saudi Building Code 2024 — for our scope principally SBC 401, the Saudi Electrical Code, and SBC 801, the Saudi Fire Protection Code (the informal name "Saudi Fire Code" is not the official title). It is issued by the Saudi Building Code Center (SBCC): Council of Ministers Resolution No. 656 of 04/09/1446H converted the former National Committee (SBCNC) into an independent centre, so documents naming SBCNC are out of date. Fire-safety approval is the General Directorate of Civil Defense under the Ministry of Interior. Separately, imported heaters, control panels and electrical fittings must be registered on SASO's SABER platform with a Product Certificate of Conformity before a shipment certificate is issued and customs will clear — we handle that registration as part of the package, not as a client action item.

Riyadh water is genuinely hard — the Gulf exception

Coastal Gulf cities run on pure desalinated water, which is soft. Riyadh does not: the network blends desalinated supply from the coast with deep groundwater, and the numbers show it. Peer-reviewed sampling of Riyadh tap water reports TDS from 68 to 793 mg/L with a mean of 499 mg/L (Alanazi et al., 2021) — right at the level WHO associates with excessive scaling in pipes, water heaters and boilers — and Saudi Water Authority authors put the groundwater feeder at 197–281 mg/L as CaCO₃ total hardness against a 60–80 target for desalinated product (Al-Hamzah & Fellows, 2024). At that hardness a steam generator without softening will scale. On Riyadh projects we specify softening on the steam feed as standard and confirm which supply the building is actually on, because the blend is not uniform across the city.

Dry heat is a different design problem from coastal heat

Riyadh's summer dry-bulb is almost identical to Doha's — ASHRAE puts the 0.4% design DB at King Khalid International at 44.9 °C — but the 0.4% evaporation wet-bulb is 21.0 °C against Doha's 31.2, roughly ten kelvin lower. The consequences are concrete: evaporative cooling is genuinely viable for plant heat rejection in Riyadh where it is marginal on the coast; an open cold plunge loses noticeably more water to evaporation and needs its make-up and level control sized for it; and a steam room in dry air has a harder job holding 100% relative humidity at the bench than the same room in Doha.

Sources: Saudi Building Code Center (sbc.gov.sa) for SBC 401 and SBC 801, 2024 edition, and for Council of Ministers Resolution No. 656; SASO and the SABER platform; Alanazi et al., Journal of Environmental Science and Public Health 5 (2021) 137–154; Al-Hamzah & Fellows, Water 2024, 16, 1810; WHO background document on total dissolved solids; ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals, Climatic Design Conditions (2021 ed.), King Khaled Intl, WMO 404370.

The scope we take

Shop drawings and technical submittals; the thermal room itself — sauna cabin, steam room, laconium, caldarium and rasul chamber; the göbek taşı and the kurna in a hammam; the steam generator, and the halogenerator where a salt room sits in the brief; benches, doors, glass, marble and mosaic finish; the room's own lighting, sensors and control panel; commissioning and handover documentation. A salt room is worth calling out separately: the halogenerator, the brine feed and the salt-resistant substrate come with our package, and a general tiling subcontractor cannot substitute for that detail.

The scope the main contractor keeps

The room shell and its structural slab; waterproof tanking and the screed falls; the floor gully and the drainage run back to the stack; a dedicated electrical supply terminated at our panel position; the treated make-up water line; extract ductwork beyond our terminal; and the fire detection loop that Civil Defense inspects under SBC 801. If the tanking or the falls are wrong, no steam room finish will survive them — which is why the wet-area substrate is inspected and signed off before our first delivery reaches site, and why a late change to the slab level is the most expensive variation on this package.

The MEP interface, in three lines

Power: a dedicated circuit sized to the generator or heater load and terminated at the panel position, coordinated under SBC 401. Water: a softened feed on the steam line — at Riyadh hardness an unsoftened generator will scale, so the softener, the blowdown drain, and the balance tank where a hydrotherapy pool shares the plant room all have to appear on the MEP drawing before the slab is poured. Extract: the terminal inside the room is ours, the duct run and the fan belong to the MEP contractor, and the two are dimensioned together at coordination stage rather than resolved on site.

Commissioning, handover and warranty

Commissioning is a witnessed sequence, not a switch-on: generator output measured against room volume, temperature and humidity held at setpoint over a timed run, drain and blowdown proven, sensor calibration recorded, control panel and BMS points mapped, then Civil Defense inspection. Handover carries as-built drawings, the SABER Product Certificate of Conformity for the imported equipment, O&M manuals, a spares list and operator training. Warranty is 24 months on the scope we supply and install, with maintenance contracts and support through the Gulf office. Our quality management system is certified to TS EN ISO 9001:2015.

For tender purposes the package is normally priced as separate line items — thermal room supply, marble and mosaic finish, steam generator and halogenerator, controls and sensors, freight and Saudi customs clearance, site installation, commissioning, operator training and warranty — so that a main contractor can compare returns like with like and see exactly which scope sits outside the wet-area builder's work. Send drawings and a room schedule and we will return a scope matrix set against them.