Wellness Real Estate: The Amenity Program for Gulf Towers

Common choices are a shared sauna and steam room, a cold plunge, a hammam, a salt room and a relaxation lounge next to the gym. Developers in Dubai and Riyadh plan them early because each needs drainage, ventilation and power that are hard to add later. We design, manufacture and install the whole wet area.

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

Updated: 12 November 2026

A guide from Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions, an Istanbul manufacturer and turnkey contractor for saunas, hammams, steam rooms and pools, working since 1987 — 40 years — on projects in 41+ countries.

Wellness real estate is the Global Wellness Institute’s name for buildings designed around the health of the people who use them, from homes and hotels to offices and senior living. The Institute reports that it doubled in size between 2019 and 2024, growing 19.5% a year, and names the Middle East–North Africa region as one of the fastest-growing markets at 22.6% a year, with rapid growth in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This guide is for the developer, the architect and the development manager who have to turn that trend into a floor plan: which amenities, how big, where in the building, and what the sauna and steam rooms need that a gym does not. The ratios and their sources are listed at the end.

Table of contents

• What does wellness real estate mean in a residential development?
• Why are Gulf developers building them in?
• Which wellness amenities make up a typical program?
• How big should the amenities be for the number of apartments?
• How is the residents’ pool sized?
• How many sauna seats does a building need?
• Where in the building do the amenities go?
• What changes when a sauna is shared by residents?
• What have we built for residential developers?
• What should the developer’s brief include?
• Frequently asked questions

In the building itself, it means wellness amenities: the shared rooms whose purpose is the residents’ physical routine rather than their social life: typically 5 to 8 spaces, from the pool and gym to the sauna, steam room, hammam, cold plunge, treatment room and changing rooms. A lobby lounge or a cinema room is an amenity; it is not a wellness amenity.

The line matters because wellness amenities are wet, hot and heavy. A gym is a fitted-out room. A pool is a structural element with a plant room. A sauna is a timber cabin with a 400 V heater and its own ventilation, and a steam room or hammam is a waterproofed wet room with a steam generator in an adjacent plant space. Each one fixes decisions in the structure, the MEP design and the fire strategy, which is why the program is best settled at concept stage rather than added when the podium is already cast.

In the Gulf, where most residents live in air-conditioned towers and gated communities, the wellness floor or clubhouse is often the only place in the development where people use water and heat for anything other than washing. It is also one of the few amenities a buyer can inspect on a site visit.

Because buyers pay for them. The Global Wellness Institute’s 2025 report on wellness real estate finds evidence that wellness-focused homes at the middle and upper end of the market sell for 10 to 25% more than comparable homes, and that the sector has grown 19.5% a year since 2019, against 5.5% for construction overall.

The same report puts wellness real estate at about 3.3% of global annual construction output and names the Middle East–North Africa region, together with Latin America and Europe, among the fastest-growing regional markets between 2019 and 2024. It points in particular to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The region starts from a small base, and the Institute notes that North America, Asia–Pacific and Europe together still make up 99% of the global total, but the direction is clear.

The Institute is also careful about what counts. Its report argues that wellness real estate is not only expensive homes with fashionable amenities, and lists unmet needs well beyond the spa floor. For a developer, the practical reading is narrower: amenities that residents use every week, sized so that they are not crowded at 7 pm, are the part of that price difference a building can actually deliver.

Most residential programs are built from 7 elements: a pool, a gym, a sauna, a steam room or hammam, a cold plunge or cold shower, a relaxation area, and separate changing rooms with showers. Larger communities add treatment rooms, a children’s pool or a separate ladies’ area.

• Pool: the largest and heaviest element; an indoor pool on a podium or roof in a tower, often an outdoor pool in a villa community.
• Gym: dry fit-out, usually beside the pool hall so that the changing rooms serve both.
• Sauna: a timber cabin with an electric heater, sized by the number of seats.
• Steam room or hammam: a tiled or stone wet room fed by a steam generator; in the Gulf the hammam is often preferred for its cultural familiarity.
• Cold plunge or cold shower: the step after the heat, placed a few metres from the sauna and steam room doors.
• Relaxation area: seats or loungers where residents cool down between rounds.
• Changing rooms: separate for men and women, with showers at the entrance to the wet area.

A smaller single room that combines some of these, for a boutique building or a penthouse floor, is a different brief; our guide to the wellness room covers that case.

Size them from the busiest hour, then check against the apartment count. With 2.5 residents per apartment and 5% of residents using the wellness floor at the peak hour, both planning assumptions, a 150-apartment tower sees about 19 people at once. At 6 m² of water each, that is about 113 m² of pool.

The table below runs the same arithmetic for three building sizes. The two ratios, 6 m² of pool water per person for comfortable swimming and 60 cm of bench per sauna seat, come from Sport England’s pool guidance and the heater manufacturer HUUM. The residents per apartment and the peak-hour share are assumptions for illustration: replace them with the sales mix of the building and the operator’s own data, and the table recalculates.

The table deliberately sizes for comfort, not for the legal maximum. Sport England quotes the UK Health and Safety Executive’s 3 m² of water per bather as the starting point for maximum numbers, and the ASA’s 6 m² as the minimum for comfortable swimming. A residents’ pool designed at 3 m² per person is full at 7 pm on a Friday, and a full pool is the complaint that reaches the owners’ association first.

From the peak number of swimmers at 6 m² each, then rounded to a shape that works for swimming. A pool of 25 × 8.5 m holds 212.5 m² of water, which Sport England’s guidance gives as a maximum load of 71 bathers at 3 m² each, or about 35 at the comfortable 6 m².

For the ASA, Sport England quotes a public-provision benchmark of 11 m² of water per 1,000 people, which is a planning figure for towns, not for a single building. Applied to 750 residents it would give a pool of barely 8 m², which shows why residential pools are sized from peak use rather than from population: residents use their own pool far more often than a town uses its public one.

The shape follows the use. If residents will swim lengths, a rectangular pool of 20 or 25 m with 2.0 m lanes works better than a larger leisure pool of irregular shape. The finishes, the hall climate and the plant for an indoor residents’ pool are covered on our page on the indoor swimming pool.

Enough for the share of peak users who want heat at the same time. At 60 cm of bench per person, as HUUM specifies, a 2.4 m bench seats 4, and a room with two tiers of 3.0 m seats 10. Benches should be at least 60 cm deep, with the highest bench around 105 cm above the floor.

HUUM’s figures also set the room. The top bench sits 110 to 130 cm below the ceiling so that bathers are in the hot layer, and an L-shaped bench layout starts from about 2.25 m² of floor, a double bench from about 2.34 m² and a U-shaped layout from about 4 m². A residents’ sauna for 6 to 10 people is therefore a room of roughly 5 to 9 m², not a cabin from a catalogue.

Sessions in a sauna are short, and the room turns over several times an hour. That is why the sauna share in the table is a quarter of peak users, not all of them: at any moment most wellness users are in the pool, the gym, the shower or the relaxation area. The steam room or hammam is usually sized one step smaller than the sauna.

On a podium, a roof or a ground-floor clubhouse, and the choice is structural before it is architectural. Water weighs 1,000 kg per cubic metre, so a 20 × 6 m pool at 1.4 m depth adds about 168 tonnes of water before the shell, finishes and balance tank. That load is designed into the frame at concept stage.

The wet rooms also need services that a typical residential floor does not provide. A sauna heater for a 10-seat room draws its own three-phase supply, a steam generator needs water, a drain and a plant space next to the steam room, and the pool needs a plant room for filtration, heating and, in the Gulf, cooling. Grouping the pool, sauna, steam room and changing rooms on one floor, around one set of risers, is almost always cheaper than spreading them.

Acoustics and privacy complete the picture. Plant rooms and pool halls are kept away from bedrooms, and the wellness floor has its own entrance from the lift lobby so that residents in bathrobes do not cross the main lobby. In a Riyadh or Jeddah community, separate ladies’ hours or a separate ladies’ area is often part of the brief from the start. Our Riyadh office works through these layouts with developers and their architects.

The duty cycle and the controls. A villa sauna is heated a few evenings a week; a residents’ sauna may run 12 to 16 hours a day. Heater manufacturers set limits for this: EOS requires the heating elements of a public sauna to be unpowered for at least 6 consecutive hours in every 24.

EOS distinguishes between private saunas, limited to 6 hours of operation with no automatic restart, and public saunas operated under the supervision of personnel. A residents’ sauna in a tower is not a private sauna and is often not supervised either, so the control mode is agreed with the heater manufacturer and the building operator at design stage: opening hours, timers, who switches it on, and who checks it each day.

The materials change with the duty. Benches, panelling and door hardware in a sauna used by several hundred residents take far more wear than in a family sauna, and the steam room’s grout, drains and generator descaling are on a maintenance schedule, not left to chance. The same questions come up in a wellness centre in Dubai, where the operator is a business rather than an owners’ association.

Wellness floors and block spas for residential developments such as Emaar Square, delivered in 2019, and Istinye Park Residence in Istanbul, a sauna and hammam for a villa in the Sedra community in Riyadh in 2024, and residential pools including the indoor pool at Tahincioğlu Nidapark in Istanbul. Emaar Properties is among the developers we have worked with.

At Emaar Square in Istanbul, the 2019 scope covered the sauna, steam room and pool of the residential spa, designed for unattended use by residents, with smaller sauna and steam room spas in individual blocks of the development. At Istinye Park Residence, it was the residents’ sauna and steam room. In Riyadh, the Sedra community villa received a sauna and a hammam in 2024. Residential pool work on our reference list also includes Nurol Tarabya Villas, Hillpark İstinye Residence, HIM Residences and Yapı Business Residence in Istanbul.

Developer and contractor clients include Emirates Engineering.

10 items, enough for the architect, the structural engineer and the MEP engineer to reserve the right space and loads at concept stage. Each can be answered with a number, and each changes the building if it is answered late.

1. Number of apartments and the expected residents per apartment from the sales mix.
2. Expected peak-hour use, from the operator or from a comparable building.
3. Pool water area at 6 m² per peak swimmer, and whether residents will swim lengths.
4. Pool location and maximum water depth, for the structural load.
5. Sauna seats at 60 cm of bench each, and the room size that follows.
6. Steam room or hammam, or both, and the plant space for the steam generator.
7. Cold plunge or cold shower within a few metres of the heat rooms.
8. Changing rooms, showers and any separate ladies’ area or hours.
9. Electrical supply for heaters and plant, and the operating hours the controls must allow.
10. Who operates and maintains the wellness floor after handover.

For larger schemes, a spa developer or consultant turns this list into a room program and a cost plan before the architect draws. Our spa developer page describes how we take a developer’s brief from program to handover.

Sauna Dekor has designed and built saunas, steam rooms, hammams and pools since 1987: 40 years of manufacturing in Istanbul, in our own facility in İkitelli OSB, with a team of 19 employees, working under TS EN ISO 9001:2015, and with 5,000+ projects in 41+ countries. We design the wet and hot rooms of a wellness floor, manufacture the sauna cabins, benches and hammam elements, and install them with our own teams travelling from Istanbul.

We do not manufacture sauna heaters, steam generators or pool pumps. EOS, Harvia and Condair make that equipment, and any CE marking or EN 60335 conformity on it belongs to its manufacturer. The TS EN ISO 9001:2015 certificate is ours.