Overview
Sauna Dekor designs, manufactures and installs saunas, hammams and steam rooms as a single contractor. The company was founded in 1987, is now in its 40th year, and works from its own production plant in İkitelli, Istanbul, with completed thermal areas in over 35 countries.
This page records the hammam and steam rooms at the Four Seven Hotel in the Aksaray districtof Istanbul. The zones listed for the project are Turkish bath, hammam and steam rooms; thephotographic record shows an Iznik-tiled hammam with marble kurna basins.
Scope of work
A traditional decorated hammam rather than a plain marble one: Iznik-style tiling to thewalls, marble kurna washing basins, heated benching and navel stone, with steam roomscompleting the circuit. Our package covered the room build-up and tanking, the stone and tilework, the heating circuits and control, ventilation terminals, drainage and commissioning.
Fixing decorative tile over a heated substrate
Decorated hammam walls look like a finishes question and are really a movement question.Behind the tile sits a wall that is warm, damp and in a room that cycles daily between soaktemperature and cold. Tile, adhesive, render and substrate all expand at different rates, sothe build-up has to be specified as a system: a deformable adhesive rather than a rigid one,movement joints designed into the tile grid rather than cut in later where a crack has alreadystarted, and grout that stays flexible enough to absorb what is left. Skipping any of thesedoes not fail on handover; it fails in the second or third year, which is why it is so oftenattributed to the tiles rather than to the detail behind them.
Kurna basins and the geometry they set
The kurna is the marble basin a bather washes at, and its position governs far more thanits own footprint: bench lengths either side, the seated clearance a bather needs to pour, thehot and cold supply runs behind the wall, and the direction of every floor fall. We set kurnaand gully positions first, resolved the falls against them, then cut the marble to suit. In adecorated hammam this matters twice over, because the tile grid also has to land correctlyaround the basins — a pattern that dies awkwardly into a kurna is visible for the life of theroom. Read more on what is a Turkishbath and modernhammam.
Heat, air and tanking
The hammam is heated through its slab, with navel stone and benches warmed from below, amoderate air temperature and high humidity; the room needs a long soak before opening ratherthan a thermostat chasing setpoint. Steam enclosures are sized on volume with a correction forthe finish, plus reserve for door openings. Extract runs continuously and on past closing soboth rooms dry down overnight. All wet rooms were tanked before finishes — bonded membrane overthe screed, reinforcing tape into corners, movement joints and penetrations, falls in thescreed, epoxy grout above. See alsosteam room.
What we solved on site
Setting out was the whole job here. A decorated hammam has to satisfy three grids at once —drainage falls, the marble bench and kurna layout, and the tile pattern — and they do notnaturally agree. We resolved them on the shop drawings, dry-laid the tile and stone in ourIstanbul workshop to confirm the pattern landedcorrectly at every corner and basin, then numbered and delivered. That way the only decisionsleft on site were fixing decisions, not composition ones. More athotel spa design andservices.
