Spa Changing Room Design for a Gulf Hotel Spa

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

Last updated: 5 November 2026

The numbers below come from Approved Document F, Approved Document M, the Abu Dhabi Electricity Wiring Regulations and Sport England’s design guidance. Where a figure is borrowed from English or swimming pool guidance, we say so; the local code and the project’s MEP engineer decide.

Table of contents

• What zones does spa changing room design have to fit?
• Why does a Gulf hotel spa plan 2 changing suites?
• How do hotel guests and day guests use the room differently?
• Where do the entrance screen and the shoe line go?
• What size and type of locker suits a spa changing room?
• How big should the vanity area be?
• What electrical rules apply in a changing room with showers?
• How much air should a spa changing room extract?
• How does the wet side lead into the thermal rooms?
• What accessible rooms does each suite need?
• How do towels, cleaning and staff reach the room?
• What does the route look like in a built spa?
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

A spa changing room holds 6 zones in a fixed order: a screened entrance, a shoe line, the locker area, the vanity area, the toilets and the showers that open onto the wet side. A guest walks them in that order on the way in and in reverse on the way out, so the plan is a sequence before it is a room.

Sport England, writing about swimming pools, asks for the route from reception to the pool to be organised in a logical sequence for wayfinding, operation and supervision. In a hotel spa the sauna, steam room and hammam replace the pool, and the sequence is the first thing we check on any spa changing room design we review. Each zone has its own floor and cleaning routine; the toilets sit on the route so nobody crosses the dry floor with wet feet.

Most Gulf hotel spa briefs we receive ask for separate male and female zones, and in plan that means 2 suites with 2 entrances, 2 locker areas, 2 vanity areas and 2 shower lines. Each suite usually leads to its own thermal rooms, so the separation runs from the spa reception to the steam room door.

The consequence is that every decision in this guide is made twice and mirrored. A shower line drawn on one side of the corridor has a twin on the other; an extract duct sized for one suite has a twin; a staff door into one suite has a twin. The 2 suites do not have to be the same size, because the operator may expect a different split of guests, but they must each be complete. Where the suites meet, at the reception, a shared treatment corridor or the staff route, each point needs a door, a screen or a timetable; that split is an operating decision a spa consultant settles before the drawing.

A hotel spa changing room serves 2 kinds of guest. Hotel residents often arrive from their rooms in a robe and slippers, with almost nothing to store. Day guests and club members arrive from the street in clothes and shoes, with a bag, and they use every zone from the shoe line to the vanity mirror.

The room is sized for the second group and passed through by the first. In practice we draw a direct path from the entrance to the wet side for residents, and a longer loop through the lockers for day guests. Both paths start at the same screened door and end at the same showers. Where the operator expects a large share of day membership, the locker area and the vanity area grow; where the hotel serves mostly residents, the robe store near the wet side matters more than the locker count.

The entrance screen goes at the door, so that nobody in the corridor can see into the suite when the door opens, and the shoe line goes 1 step inside it. Sport England asks for single-sex changing areas to be well-screened from common areas; in practice that means a turn, a wall or a solid screen between the door and the first bench.

The shoe line is the boundary between floors. Outside it, the floor takes street shoes and sand from the hotel grounds; inside it, the floor is barefoot. We put shoe storage, open racks or small lockers, right at the line, so that shoes never travel further into the suite. The line is also where cleaning changes from dry methods to the wet methods of the rest of the room.

Sport England describes the standard locker column as about 1.8 m high, 0.3 m wide and 0.5 to 0.6 m deep, split into full, half, third or quarter-height lockers. It suggests half-height units for 50 to 70% of the total, and asks for some lockers at least 0.4 m wide for bags.

Those proportions come from public pools, and a hotel spa shifts them. Day guests in a hotel spa often carry work clothes and a bag, so we push more of the provision towards full-height and wider lockers than a pool would. Residents in robes need only small lockers for a phone and a key card, which is a case for a short row of quarter-height units near the wet side.

Placement matters as much as size. Sport England notes that lockers placed opposite changing cubicles or benches reduce the risk of dropping clothes onto a wet floor, and that benches should be cantilevered from the wall so the floor beneath them can be cleaned. Approved Document M adds a clear manoeuvring space of 1,500 mm in front of lockers in accessible changing areas.

The material follows the air. A changing room next to showers is humid for most of the day, so we specify carcasses and doors that tolerate moisture and wiping, such as solid laminate, ventilated through the doors or plinth. The number of lockers is a separate calculation from the operator’s peak occupancy.

The vanity area is sized from the lockers. The scale of provision in BS 6465-1, quoted by Sport England for pools, gives 1 vanity place per 30 lockers for men and 1 per 20 lockers for women. On that basis, 60 lockers in each suite would mean 2 vanity places on the male side and 3 on the female side.

Sport England lists what each place needs: hand-held hair dryers, well-lit mirrors and a shelf at least 300 mm deep for bags and small items such as combs. Mirrors and shelves are set so that people of all heights, including wheelchair users, can reach them. In a hotel spa the operator often adds a countertop with toiletries and a tissue dispenser to the same run.

The vanity area sits on the dry side, close to the exit. Sport England warns that a vanity area near the entrance must be large enough for people passing through as well as people using it, so we keep a clear lane past the mirrors.

In Abu Dhabi, the Electricity Wiring Regulations treat bathrooms and similar locations where people are partly clothed and in contact with water as one class. Every final circuit there needs 30 mA RCD protection, every luminaire and appliance needs at least IPX5, and only shaver sockets to BS EN 61558-2-5 are allowed.

No appliance, luminaire or accessory may be installed within arm’s reach of a bath, shower or similar facility, unless it is supplied by SELV or PELV and rated at least IPX5. Arm’s reach is defined as 2.5 m in height from the standing surface and 1.25 m horizontally. Switches for equipment in the room are placed outside it or operated by a pull cord.

For spa changing room design this decides where the hair dryers go. Ordinary socket-outlets are not permitted in such a location, so the hair dryers are hard-wired units, mounted on the vanity wall, out of arm’s reach of the shower line and on an RCD-protected circuit. Dubai and the other Gulf states have their own wiring codes, and the project’s electrical engineer applies the one that governs the site.

Approved Document F, the English guidance for buildings other than dwellings, sets an intermittent extract rate of 15 litres per second for each shower and 6 litres per second for each WC or urinal. A suite with 6 showers and 3 WCs therefore extracts at least 108 litres per second from its wet zones.

That is 6 × 15 = 90 l/s plus 3 × 6 = 18 l/s. Approved Document F also asks that extract ventilators in sanitary accommodation be capable of continuous operation, and in a spa that runs all day we design them to run continuously during opening hours. In the Gulf, the local code and the MEP engineer set the final figure; the English rate is a useful floor for an early plan.

The direction of the air matters as much as the volume. We arrange the supply on the dry side, in the locker and vanity areas, and the extract on the wet side, in the showers and toilets, so that air moves from dry to wet and steam does not drift towards the lockers. The thermal rooms behind the showers have their own ventilation, which our guide to sauna ventilation covers room by room.

The wet side starts at the shower line and ends at the door of the first thermal room. Approved Document M asks that any combined changing and shower facility be divided into 2 distinct areas, wet and dry, and that the changing floor, where it serves showers, be level and slip resistant both dry and wet.

In a hotel spa the showers do two jobs. Guests rinse before they enter the sauna, steam room or hammam, and they cool down and rinse again between rounds. The first job belongs to the changing suite; the second often belongs to the thermal area itself, where an experience shower or a bucket shower stands between the hot rooms. Our page on experience showers and shower systems shows the second kind.

Where the thermal rooms are shared on a timetable, the 2 wet sides meet at a controlled door. The order of rooms beyond it is the subject of our guide to Roman thermal rooms and their modern circuit.

Approved Document M asks for individual self-contained changing and shower rooms in addition to communal separate-sex facilities, with a choice of left-hand and right-hand transfer layouts when more than 1 such room is provided. Each room has wall-mounted drop-down support rails, a slip-resistant tip-up seat and an emergency pull cord.

In a plan with 2 separate suites, that gives the accessible rooms a natural place. We usually put them on the spa side of the split, entered from a neutral corridor, rather than inside either suite. That way they serve both groups, they do not need to be duplicated, and they lead directly to a step-free route into the thermal area.

Each suite needs a staff door, a clean towel store, a used towel return and a cleaner’s sink. The scale of provision in BS 6465-1, as quoted by Sport England, gives 1 cleaner’s sink and store for every 100 m² of the area it serves.

Towels set the rhythm of the room. A guest in a thermal suite uses more than one towel in a visit, and the used towels arrive wet, at the end of the wet side, while the clean ones are handed out at the start. We put the return bin at the exit of the shower line and the clean stock at the entrance or the reception, and connect both to back-of-house by a staff route that does not cross the other suite.

At Gumush Residence in Baku, where we built the sauna, steam rooms, hammam, relaxation room, shock bucket and ice fountain, the spa is entered through a corridor of 2 rows of backlit screens. The corridor works as the screen that hides the rooms beyond, and it ends at a glazed door.

The relaxation room in the same Gumush Residence spa shows where the dry route leads after the heat. The changing rooms between the two were not in our scope there, so we do not describe them; the photographs show the start and the end of the sequence.

On a hotel project the architect or interior designer usually draws the changing suites, and we join when the thermal rooms are placed: the moment to check that the showers sit between lockers and heat and that the extract runs from dry to wet. For operators weighing the space against revenue, our article on hotel spa ROI looks at the commercial side.

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 design and build the thermal rooms that a changing suite serves: saunas, steam rooms, hammams, showers and cold plunges, and we advise on the plan around them. We do not manufacture lockers, hair dryers, electrical accessories or ventilation fans; those come from their manufacturers, and any marking or certification on them belongs to the manufacturer. 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.

The changing suite is planned as the start of the thermal route, so the doors follow the order in which a guest moves:

• Entrance screen and shoe line, dry side
• Lockers and vanities, dry side
• Showers and toilets, the first wet threshold
• Door into the thermal suite: sauna, steam room or hammam, cold rooms and rest areas

For the rooms behind that last door, see how a thermal suite is laid out.

After the thermal rooms, guests move to the rest area; see our page on relaxation room fit-out.