What Is a Vichy Shower? The Room, the Table and the Water

What is a Vichy shower? A Vichy shower is a horizontal bar of shower heads fixed above a waterproof treatment table, so warm water falls over a guest who stays lying down through the whole treatment. It is not a piece of equipment that arrives in a crate and gets plugged in. It is a small wet room built around a table, and the parts that decide whether it works — the floor falls, the drain, the tanking, the hot water supply and the mixing valve — are all outside the bar you can see.

• What is a Vichy shower?
• Vichy shower vs Swiss shower vs experience shower
• What the table has to do
• How much water it uses
• Holding the temperature steady
• What has to be under the floor
• What looking after one involves
• Where it belongs in the circuit
• Who builds a room like this
• Frequently asked questions
• How to start a project

A Vichy shower is a treatment station made of two things that have to be designed together: a horizontal bar carrying between five and seven shower heads, and a waterproof table underneath it. The guest lies on the table. The therapist works alongside. Water falls the whole time, usually for 20 to 30 minutes, and drains away under the table rather than being collected in a tray.

The name comes from Vichy in central France, where thermal water treatments were given under falling water in the nineteenth century. What survives from that is the posture, not the chemistry. A modern Vichy shower runs on ordinary treated mains water, and the reason it is still specified is practical: the guest never has to get up, dry off and move to a shower between the scrub and the rinse.

That single fact — nobody stands up — is what drives every engineering decision in the room. If you are planning one for a hotel, a members’ club or a private wellness suite, our team can walk the drawing with you; for the manufacturing and installation side of the same room, see who manufactures and installs a Vichy shower.

The three get confused on drawings constantly, and they are three different rooms with three different drainage loads. A Vichy shower is horizontal and continuous. A Swiss shower is vertical and short. An experience shower is vertical, short and programmed.

Read the bottom row again, because it is the one that costs money when it is missed. A Swiss shower asks a building for a short burst. A Vichy shower asks it for a sustained draw, treatment after treatment, all day. Those are different questions for the same hot water plant. If your brief is really the vertical kind, an experience shower is the family to look at instead.

The table is the part clients underestimate. A standard massage couch will not survive under a Vichy bar for a season. Four things separate a wet table from a dry one.

• It has to shed water, not hold it. The surface is dished or falls to one side, with a radiused edge so water leaves the table rather than tracking underneath it.
• It has to be heated. Water at 37 °C (99 °F) falling on an unheated surface still leaves a guest cold within a few minutes, because the table draws heat out of the back faster than the water puts it in. A heated top is not a comfort upgrade; it is what makes a 30-minute treatment tolerable.
• It has to be the right height for the therapist, not the guest. The therapist stands and works for the whole treatment, in water, in humidity. Table height is set from the therapist’s elbow, and it is a decision that should be made with the spa manager before anything is fixed.
• Its fixings have to be inside the waterproofing, not through it. Every bolt driven through a tanked floor after the membrane is laid is a leak with a date on it. Fixing blocks are cast in before the membrane goes down.

Five to seven heads running together for 25 minutes is a continuous draw, and that is the number the mechanical engineer needs — not the fixture count. A room designed on fixture units, the way a bathroom is, will run out of hot water in the middle of the second treatment of the morning and the spa will blame the bar.

The calculation that works is straightforward. Take the flow of the bar at the design pressure, multiply by the longest continuous treatment on the menu, add the turnaround rinse, and then ask how many of those the hot water plant has to deliver back to back at the busiest hour. In a hotel that shares its hot water with guest rooms, that hour is usually mid-morning, and it is usually the hour nobody modelled.

Two further consequences follow from the same continuous draw:

• Pipe sizing is set by the bar, not by the room. A branch sized for a shower head will starve a seven-head bar and the temperature will wander every time another outlet opens elsewhere.
• Water hardness stops being cosmetic. Scale on a spray plate changes the pattern of the fall within months. In hard-water regions the bar needs pre-treatment on its own supply, decided at design stage rather than after the first complaint.

A guest under a Vichy bar cannot step out of the way. That is the entire safety case, and it is why the valve set matters more here than in almost any other wet room.

The bar is fed through a thermostatic mixing valve rather than a manual mixer, sized for the flow of the whole bar. The valve has to fail safe: if the cold supply is lost, it shuts rather than passing hot water through. Thermostatic mixing valves for this duty are covered by EN 1111 and EN 15092 in Europe, published through CEN and CENELEC, and by the ASSE 1017 and ASSE 1070 families in North America, written by ASSE International — worth naming in the specification, because a valve that merely mixes is not the same product as a valve that shuts.

Two practical details that get left off drawings:

• The valve controls sit on the therapist’s working side, reachable without leaning over the guest.
• The room needs a written flushing regime for the periods when it is not in use. A bar with seven heads holds warm, still water in dead legs between treatments, and any wet area with intermittent use needs a written water safety plan for exactly that reason — the UK Health and Safety Executive sets out why in its guidance on water systems.

Everything that decides whether the room lasts is buried. Working from the slab upwards:

• Falls formed in the screed, not in the tile. Between 1:50 and 1:80 across the wet zone, set out so the whole table footprint drains away from the therapist’s standing position.
• A bonded waterproofing membrane over the full wet area, carried up the walls, with a dressed collar at the drain flange. Membranes for this duty are specified to EN 14891 or ANSI A118.10, the latter maintained by the Tile Council of North America.
• A drain sized on open grate area, not on nominal pipe diameter. A 100 mm outlet with a grate that only presents 20 cm² of opening will pond under a running bar. A linear channel the length of the table is the usual answer.
• Access to the trap without lifting stone. Oils, salts and scrub media all end up in that trap. If servicing it means taking up a slab, it will not get serviced.
• Slip resistance chosen for wet bare feet. Barefoot areas are classified separately from shod areas; the therapist is standing on the same floor for eight hours and the classification has to work for both.

A Vichy shower is not a high-maintenance room, but it is an unforgiving one: every job on the list below is easy while the room is being designed and expensive once the stone is down. Planning for these five items at design stage is what keeps the bar behaving the way it did on handover day.

• Spray plates come off and get descaled. Five to seven heads run for hours a day, and scale changes the fall pattern long before anyone calls it a fault. The heads should unscrew by hand, and the maintenance schedule should say how often — monthly in hard-water regions, quarterly where the supply is soft or pre-treated.
• The trap gets opened, not just rodded. Scrub media, salts and treatment oils all settle there. A linear channel with a lift-out basket is serviced in two minutes; a gully under a fixed slab is serviced once a year, badly.
• The flushing regime is written down and dated. Dead legs between the mixing valve and the heads hold still water whenever the room is quiet. A logged weekly flush through every head, and a longer one after a shutdown, is the routine that keeps the system where the water safety plan expects it to be.
• The mixing valve is tested on a schedule, not on a complaint. Thermostatic valves are serviceable items. The fail-safe function is checked at commissioning and then at the interval the manufacturer states, and the result is recorded, because the record is what gets asked for after an incident.
• The table surface is inspected where nobody looks. The underside, the fixing points and the radiused edge are where water finds its way in. A five-minute look during the quarterly service is worth more than any warranty clause.

None of this needs a specialist visit. It needs a room that was built so the parts can be reached, which is a design decision taken long before the first treatment is sold.

A Vichy shower is a treatment room that happens to be wet, so it sits between the thermal rooms and the dry treatment rooms rather than inside either. Guests usually arrive at it warm — from a hammam or a steam room — and leave it to rest.

Three planning consequences follow:

• It needs its own entry sequence. A wet, undressed guest should not cross a dry corridor to reach it.
• It is louder than a treatment room. Falling water on stone carries. Either it is acoustically separated from the quiet treatment rooms or it is grouped with the wet zone.
• It changes the humidity load next door. Extraction is sized for a room that runs wet for most of the working day, not for a shower used twice.

If the room sits inside a larger wet circuit, it is worth reading it alongside the rest of the sequence — our note on how a thermal suite is planned covers the room-to-room logic in more detail.

Sauna Dekor has been manufacturing custom saunas, steam rooms, hammams, pools and wet treatment areas since 1987, and is now in its 40th year. The rooms are built in our own facility in Istanbul and delivered to 41+ countries. We are a team of 19; that is a deliberate size for a business that designs, manufactures and commissions the same room rather than sub-letting it in three pieces. Our quality system is certified to TS EN ISO 9001:2015.

What we do not make is worth saying as plainly. The thermostatic mixing valves, the shower heads and the control gear are bought in from specialist manufacturers and carry their approvals, not ours. We design the room, build the table and the bar, and commission the assembly.

Delivered work that sits closest to this room includes complete hotel wet areas with treatment suites around them — among them a five-star city hotel in Istanbul and a hotel spa in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, where the flotation pool, the mosaic hammam and the treatment suite were manufactured in Istanbul and commissioned on site. Hotel references include Hilton Istanbul Maslak (2017, spa and pool) and Ritz-Carlton Istanbul (2013). Emirates Engineering is a developer and contractor client.

So, what is a Vichy shower, reduced to one line? A heated waterproof table, a five-to-seven-head bar above it, a thermostatic valve that fails safe, and a floor built to take the water away for half an hour at a time. Everything else is finish.

If you are specifying a Vichy shower for a hotel, a members’ club, a clinic or a private wellness suite, the useful moment to involve a manufacturer is while the slab is still a drawing. Send us the plan and the treatment menu and our team will tell you what the floor has to do before anything is ordered.

Request a consultation with our design team, or read how we approach commercial spa projects and private wellness suites.

Standards and sources referenced in this article

• EN 1111 and EN 15092 — thermostatic mixing valves (Europe). Published through CEN and CENELEC.
• ASSE 1017 and ASSE 1070 — thermostatic and temperature-actuated mixing valves (North America). Written by ASSE International.
• EN 14891 and ANSI A118.10 — bonded liquid-applied waterproofing membranes below tile. ANSI A118.10 is maintained by the Tile Council of North America.
• Water safety and flushing regimes for wet areas in intermittent use — UK Health and Safety Executive guidance on water systems.

These are the product and system standards a specification should name. They belong to the products and the installation, and are listed here so the specification can be checked against them.

A Vichy shower is a horizontal rain bar mounted over a wet treatment table, so a guest lies down while several heads spray water along the body. It needs a sloped, fully waterproofed wet room, a floor drain, a mixing valve and an extract fan. Hotels and day spas install it in a dedicated wet room.