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 a private steam room in New York with a fibre-optic starlight ceiling.The client is not named; the zone recorded for the project is a steam room.
Scope of work
A single room, built to a high finish standard: a sealed steam enclosure with mouldedseating, a fibre-optic ceiling that reads as a night sky through the vapour, and thegenerator, controls and drainage that make it work. The package covered the room build-upand tanking, the finishes, the seat geometry, the generator and steam head, the lightinginstallation and commissioning.
Sizing the generator
Steam generators are sized on enclosure volume and on how much heat the room loses throughits surfaces — and those two are not proportional. A room lined in mosaic on a masonry backingloses far more than the same volume over insulated board, because the finish is a large thermalmass that must reach temperature before the room holds steam. General practice is to calculatethe volume, apply a correction for the finish and for glazing, then add headroom for dooropenings. Undersizing shows up as a room that collapses when someone walks in; oversizing asscalding bursts and a short-cycling generator. Ourhow to build a steam room guideand steam and sauna supplier pageset out the same method.
Seat geometry, steam head and the ceiling
Comfort in a steam room is mostly geometry. Seats are moulded with a fall so water runs offrather than pooling under the bather, backs are raked, and the front edge is radiused becausea square edge in a wet room is unpleasant against the back of the knee. The steam head isplaced low, away from the seats and never where a bather could reach or brush against it, withthe discharge directed into open floor. The ceiling is pitched or coved — even a modest fallis enough to move condensate to the perimeter instead of dropping it on the person below.That fall is also what makes a fibre-optic ceiling practical: the light points are set into asealed lining, the emitters and their driver sit outside the wet envelope entirely, and onlythe fibres cross the boundary, so the enclosure stays sealed and nothing electrical lives inthe steam.
Tanking and drying down
A steam room is the hardest wet room in a building to waterproof, because it is loaded withvapour rather than splashed: pressure drives moisture into every joint and penetration. Theroom is fully tanked before finishes — bonded membrane over screed, walls and ceiling,reinforcing tape into every corner, movement joint and penetration, dressed into the gully.Epoxy grout throughout, falls in the screed. And it needs extract that keeps running after thesession, because a steam room sealed up wet has a short life. Product detail on oursteam room andsteam room design pages.
What we solved on site
The starlight ceiling and the waterproofing are in direct conflict: one wants hundreds ofsmall penetrations in the lining, the other wants no penetrations at all. The resolution wasto build the ceiling as a sealed panel, complete with its fibres, before it went into theroom, so that the membrane was breached in a controlled way on a bench rather than overheadin a finished enclosure — and to keep every electrical component, including the light source,outside the steam envelope with only the passive fibres crossing it. That also means theemitter can be serviced without opening the room. Related reading:private spa andour United States page.
