Sauna Door and Sauna Glass Door: Glass, Size and Swing

Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions engineering team, Istanbul · project and press enquiries: Alican Aykaç, Managing Partner

Last updated: 6 November 2026

Each figure below comes from a manufacturer’s published sheet: Andres Glass Solutions of Tallinn, whose doors we fit, and the installation manual of Harvia, the Finnish heater maker. The glass standard is EN 12150-1, which the GCC Standardization Organization publishes as GSO EN 12150-1. Where a figure is not published, we say so instead of filling the gap.

Table of contents

• What is a sauna door made of?
• Why must sauna door glass be tempered, and how thick is it?
• What size is a standard sauna door?
• Which way must a sauna door open?
• Why is there a gap under a sauna door?
• How is a steam room door different from a sauna door?
• What should you ask about hinges and handles?
• How does a glass front change the sauna?
• Where does the door go in a hotel or villa plan?
• What do our sauna doors look like on site?
• How is a sauna glass door maintained?
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

A sauna door is 3 parts: a pane of 8 mm tempered glass, a timber or aluminium frame, and the hardware that hangs and holds it. On Andres doors the timber frame profile is 42 × 92 mm, or 42 × 68 mm on its slimmer Raiser-68 model; the aluminium frame is 43 × 50 mm.

The pane is the door leaf. There is no timber leaf with glass set into it, as in an ordinary interior door; the glass itself swings on two hinges fixed to the frame. That is why a sauna glass door looks so light, and also why every hole for the hinges and handle has to be made in the factory before the glass is tempered.

The frame is chosen to match the room. On the Andres Light Premium the frame is finger-jointed timber in alder, aspen or thermo aspen, 92 mm deep. A timber frame that matches the sauna lining reads as part of the cabin; an aluminium frame suits a glass front set into stone or tile. Either way, the frame depth has to close the full wall build-up, which our guide to sauna insulation breaks down layer by layer.

Sauna door glass is tempered so that it is stronger and breaks safely, and the default thickness is 8 mm. Andres makes both sauna doors and sauna glass walls in 8 mm tempered glass, and its shower doors in 6 mm. The governing standard for this glass is EN 12150-1.

EN 12150-1 covers thermally toughened soda lime silicate safety glass for buildings. Its scope lists tolerances, flatness, edgework, fragmentation and physical and mechanical characteristics. For a project team, the useful point is that a pane made to this standard is a defined product with a marking, not a description in a catalogue, so the standard should be named in the door specification.

Tempering also brings one weakness that matters on site. Andres puts its tempered glass at five times the strength of untempered glass, but warns that the slightest contact between an edge or a corner and a hard surface can break it. On site that means the pane is carried and hung with care, and never set down edge-first on tile or concrete.

Standard sauna door openings are 700, 800 or 900 mm wide and 1,900, 2,000 or 2,100 mm high, the 9 sizes Andres lists for its Light Premium door. The outside of the frame is 10 mm narrower than the opening, which is the fixing tolerance, and special sizes are made to order.

The height choice follows the ceiling. A sauna ceiling usually sits between 2,100 and 2,300 mm, so a 1,900 mm door leaves a visible band of wall above it, while a 2,100 mm door almost meets the ceiling line. The width choice follows use: a hotel sauna that guests enter with towels and buckets is easier with a wider opening than a compact villa cabin.

Fix the opening before the framing is built. The wall is framed around the door, not the other way round, and a framed opening that misses the standard sizes by a few centimetres turns a stock door into a special order. A made-to-measure cabin can take any opening; how that choice compares with a catalogue cabin is set out in our guide to custom vs prefabricated sauna.

A sauna door must open outward and must not have a lock or latch. That is Harvia’s installation rule, and it allows 4 kinds of fastening instead: magnetic catches, friction catches, and spring-loaded or gravity door closers. A guest who feels unwell can leave by pushing the door, without a handle or a key.

Outward opening has a planning cost: the swing needs free floor outside the room. In a bathroom retrofit that is often the deciding constraint, as our guide to the bathroom sauna explains. In a hotel the swing must not block the corridor or collide with a neighbouring door, which is a matter for the plan rather than the hardware.

The hand of the door can usually be decided late. Andres produces right-handed doors by default, but most of its standard doors are universal, so the opening side can be changed on site. The exceptions are some special models, so the hand is still confirmed on the drawings before ordering.

On a standard Andres sauna door the glass stops 21 mm short of the frame at the bottom. That gap lets the door open freely and relieves pressure; it is not the sauna’s air supply. Harvia requires a gap of at least 100 mm only in one case: when the exhaust vent is in the washroom.

Andres publishes the gap for each door type, and the difference between them is deliberate. A sauna door has 21 mm, its slim Raiser-68 sauna door 3 mm, a steam bath door 30 mm, a glass solution door 50 mm and an ordinary interior door 5 mm. The sauna figure is generous because a sauna is meant to exchange air.

But the air exchange belongs to vents, not to the door. Harvia’s manual places the supply near the heater and the exhaust low on the wall far from it, sized to six air changes an hour. Only where the exhaust is placed in the neighbouring washroom does the door gap become part of the air path, and then Harvia asks for at least 100 mm and makes mechanical exhaust mandatory. Our article on sauna ventilation sets out both arrangements.

A steam room door holds the room’s air in, while a sauna door lets it move. Andres gives a steam bath door a 30 mm glass-to-frame gap instead of 21 mm, and fits a sealing piece across the gap when a frameless glass door is used for a steam room or hammam. A threshold can also be ordered.

The two rooms work in opposite ways. A sauna is hot and dry, and its air is meant to flow from the inlet by the heater to the extract. A steam room runs close to saturation, and any vapour that escapes under the door condenses in the corridor outside. So the same glass from the same maker becomes two different doors, specified by the room they close.

On a hotel corridor where a sauna and a steam room sit side by side, the two doors often look identical from outside, as in the Dubai villa above. The difference is in the detail at the bottom of the frame and in the seal, which is why we list sauna doors and steam doors as separate items in every schedule.

Ask 3 questions about the hardware: how the hinges are adjusted, what the handle is made of, and what temperature the manufacturer rates them for. The first two are published by Andres; the third is not published on its product page or its installation and maintenance sheets, so it belongs in the submittal request.

Hinges first. Andres states that, depending on the hinge type, the glass can be moved forwards or backwards by adjusting the inner bolts. Its maintenance sheet asks for the hinges to be adjusted and the moving parts oiled as needed, and the fastenings of handles and catches to be tightened from time to time. A door that closes cleanly in year one will need that adjustment after hundreds of heating cycles.

Handles second. On the Light Premium, Andres offers the handle in wood-to-wood, stainless steel or chrome, in two sizes. The handle is the one surface every guest grips, so for a hotel sauna that runs hot all day we specify a handle with timber where the hand goes.

Temperature third. Because no rating is published for the hinges or the handle in the documents we read, we ask the manufacturer to state it in writing for the project, alongside the glass marking to EN 12150-1. A written answer is worth more than an assumption when a hotel’s operator asks the question at handover.

A glass front changes the heater size. Harvia adds 1.2 m³ to the room volume for each square metre of glass or other uninsulated wall; its own example puts a 10 m³ sauna with a glass door at the output of about a 12 m³ room. A 2.0 × 2.1 m glass front adds about 5 m³.

The arithmetic is simple: 2.0 m × 2.1 m is 4.2 m² of glass, and 4.2 × 1.2 is 5.04 m³ added to the design volume. A small cabin with a full glass front can therefore need the heater of a much larger room. That is why the glazed area is fixed before the heater is chosen, never after.

A glass front is built from the same family as the door: fixed panes of tempered glass beside and above a hinged pane, in a matching frame. Andres offers its sauna glass in clear, bronze, grey, matte and extra-clear finishes. Clear glass opens the cabin to the room outside; tinted or matte glass keeps the inside private while letting the light through. Our commercial sauna specification guide lists glass as its own line in the submittal for exactly this reason.

The door goes where 3 things are clear: the outward swing, the route to the cold, and the heater. Guests should not pass the heater to reach the benches, the swing should not cut across a corridor, and the door should face the shower or cold rooms the guest goes to next.

Harvia notes that the position of the door often affects where the heater can be placed in the benches, so the door and the heater are decided together. On our drawings the door sits at the end of the room furthest from the heater where possible, with the lower bench nearest the door so guests climb into the heat rather than step past it. The bench tiers, depths and headroom behind that layout are set out in our sauna bench height guide.

Outside the room, the swing is the issue. A hotel spa corridor with a sauna, a steam room and showers along one wall has several outward-opening doors within a few metres; we draw each swing and check that two doors cannot open into each other or into the path of a guest walking to the cold. In a villa, the same check is made against vanities, shower screens and the bathroom door. Our work on saunas in Dubai applies the same check to apartments and villas.

Our project photographs show 3 versions of the same decisions. In a private villa in Dubai, two etched glass doors open off one corridor. In a private villa in Lagos, a full-height glass front carries a hinged door. At Emaar Square, Istanbul, a clear glass steam room door has brass bar handles.

The Dubai villa shows a sauna door and a steam room door that match from the corridor, with etched glass for privacy and vertical bar handles in pale timber frames. The villa sauna in Lagos shows the glass front: the hinged door and the fixed pane read as one wall of glass, with a stone threshold below and the benches visible from the room outside.

At Emaar Square the door closes a steam room, so it follows the steam rules from this guide: a glass door that holds the vapour in, with its hardware chosen to match the marble interior. The three projects use the same family of products; what changes is the room behind the door.

A sauna glass door is cleaned with a glass cleaner and a soft microfibre cloth, and its timber frame is treated at least 2 times a year. Andres prohibits acidic and alkaline cleaners, abrasive agents and insoluble powders, and warns that scratches can make tempered glass break in the long term.

Its maintenance sheet adds three points that belong in a hotel’s handover file. A small gap should be left between the floor and the bottom of the frame so the frame does not stand in water and rot. The glazing strips and seals should be checked from time to time. And timber-framed doors are not intended for outdoor use or direct running water, which keeps them away from the shower line.

Andres also permits glass warping of up to 3 mm per metre. That figure helps at handover: a door that looks slightly out of line is checked against the manufacturer’s tolerance before anyone calls it a defect.

Sauna Dekor has designed, manufactured and installed saunas, steam rooms, hammams, pools and cold plunges since 1987: 40 years of manufacturing in Istanbul, in our own facility in İkitelli OSB, with a team of 19 employees and 5,000+ projects in 41+ countries. We work under TS EN ISO 9001:2015, certificate no. 202025106. Our offices are in Istanbul (İkitelli OSB), Dubai (Latifa Tower, World Trade Centre), Bodrum (Bodrum Çarşı), Germany (Monheim am Rhein) and Boston (66 Long Wharf, Unit 4B). We also have representative offices in Haarlem and Doha.

We build the sauna rooms, frames, benches and linings in our own workshop and fit the doors. We do not manufacture the glass doors or glass walls; they are made by Andres Glass Solutions, and any marking or conformity of that glass belongs to Andres as its manufacturer. Heaters come from Harvia or EOS, and their CE marking belongs to those manufacturers too. The TS EN ISO 9001:2015 certificate is ours. On the work we deliver, the terms are 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.

• Andres glass doors
• Andres glass doors for saunas
• Andres steam room doors