Sauna, Hammam and Steam Room Build Notes by Sauna Dekor

Last updated: September 2026 Short answer: a cold plunge pool is two engineering problems wearing one finish — a refrigeration problem and a pool water treatment problem. A 2.5 m³ commercial vessel pulled from a 30 °C fill down to 10 °C has to shed about 58 kWh of heat before anyone gets in, and then hold that temperature against a circulation pump that is itself pushing 1 kW of heat back into the water. Everything else — the stone, the step, the handrail — is downstream of those two numbers. AI-generated concept illustration, not a photograph of a built project. The cold step is the position a spa gets asked about most and specifies worst. It arrives on a drawing as a rectangle labelled cold plunge , gets priced as a vessel, and then someone asks in week nine where the chiller goes, why the plant room floor is wet, and why the tiled surround of a brand-new pool has started to bloom. None of those are installation faults. They are the consequences of the vessel havin...

Every cabin on this corridor is an air, water, drainage and power demand before it is a finish. A hotel spa is drawn as a set of rooms and built as a set of services. The rooms get the attention — the timber, the stone, the lighting, the order of the circuit — and the services get whatever space is left after the rooms are set out. That order is backwards, and it is the single most reliable predictor of a difficult handover that we see across projects. We survey wet areas where the steam generator ended up in a cupboard with no drain, where the sauna's supply air comes off a corridor that is itself in negative pressure, where a snow room's condensing unit is on a roof forty metres from the room it serves, and where every wet room on the floor discharges into one shared gully. None of those is a manufacturing fault. Each is a services decision that was made late, by whoever was left holding it. Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions manufactures and installs the wet rooms in a hote...

A built-in flotation room: the pool set into the floor, a linear drain at its edge and no metal in the wetted zone. AI-generated concept illustration, not a photograph of a built project. A float tank looks like a piece of equipment you order and receive. In our experience it behaves like a small plant room with a lid, and the projects that go wrong go wrong in the same place every time: the tank was selected before the room was designed, and by the time it arrived on site the drain, the feed, the power, the extract and the structure had all been fixed for something else. We build wet areas — saunas , steam rooms , hammams , cold positions and the rooms that hold them — and we are frequently the party asked to make a flotation room work inside a spa that was designed without one. Sauna Dekor started in 1987 and is in its fortieth year, with delivered work across more than 35 countries. What follows is the checklist we run before anybody signs an order for a tank. Three differe...

Ice fountain delivered for a hotel wet area, Doha. An ice fountain is the cheapest position in a thermal suite to draw and the easiest one to get wrong, because it looks like a piece of furniture and behaves like a piece of refrigeration plant. We survey wet areas where the fountain is dry by ten in the morning, where the bowl is warm and the ice has slumped into a puddle, and where the drain under it was never run because the drawing showed a sculpture. None of that is a manufacturing fault. It is a specification that treated a machine as a finish. Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions manufactures and installs the cold positions in a thermal circuit — ice fountains , shock buckets , cold plunge pools and snow rooms — alongside the hot ones. The cabins, benches and hammam elements are made in our own workshop at İkitelli OSB, Başakşehir, Istanbul. The business has been doing this since 1987, which makes this its fortieth year, with delivered work in more than 35 countries and current site wo...

Private villa sauna with a pitched ceiling, Istanbul — the full set of photographs from this room . Almost everyone specifying a residential sauna starts at the wrong end. Brand first, then cabin size, then timber species, and heat type last — by which point the decision has already been made for them by whatever the shortlist happened to sell, or by an electrical design that was frozen two months earlier. The decisions have a correct order, and it is roughly the reverse of how the market presents them. What follows is that order, written by the people who get called back when it was ignored. Some disclosure before the advice, because it is relevant. Sauna Dekor Spa Solutions manufactures saunas — we run our own joinery workshop in Istanbul, we have done since 1987, and this is our fortieth year. We are also the contractor that installs them, in villas, branded residences and hotel projects across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Türkiye, and in more than 35 countries in total. So w...

Snow rooms and salt rooms are the two rooms in a hotel spa most likely to be bought from the wrong kind of company. Both look, in a moodboard, like finishes. Neither one is. A snow room is a refrigeration plant wrapped in a cold-store envelope. A salt room is a hygroscopic, mildly corrosive material assembly with its own air handling. When they are procured as decoration, they fail as engineering — and they fail slowly, eighteen months after handover, which is exactly when nobody wants to open a wall. This article is about how the two rooms are actually built and how to tell, in a tender interview, whether the company in front of you manufactures them or resells them. It makes no claims about health effects of any kind. Everything below is construction, plant and interface. Why these two rooms get specified badly In most hotel spa packages the wet rooms carry a real specification. The sauna has a heater kW figure, a bench layout and a ventilation rate. The steam room has a ge...

Short answer: an experience shower is a ceiling-recessed plumbing and control assembly, not a fitting you hang on a wall. A single hotel-grade station needs a 150 mm ceiling recess, a flat wall behind it for the side jets, at least 25 L/min at 3 bar dynamic pressure, its own floor drain and a thermostatic valve, plus a control unit of roughly 525 × 500 × 150 mm somewhere dry. On a North American hotel spa we priced this year, the available ceiling void was 150 mm — exactly the recess depth, before any pipework. That is the clash that decides the job. Experience showers — adventure showers, sensation showers, whichever term the consultant used — are the cheapest room in a thermal suite and the one most likely to arrive on site unbuildable. They are drawn as a symbol on the reflected ceiling plan. They are procured as a fitting. They are, in fact, a ceiling assembly with a services zone above it and a drainage strategy below it. Sauna Dekor has manufactured and installed spa wet ar...