Custom saunas in Marrakech and Casablanca, built to the room

Cedar, and when not to use it

Atlas cedar is local, aromatic and beautiful, and it belongs in a sauna as lining and as screens. What it is not is a bench material for heavy commercial use — for that we go to thermo-treated aspen, which stays cooler to the touch and is more dimensionally stable through the cycle.

So a typical cabin here is cedar walls, aspen benches and a cedar screen. It smells like Morocco and it behaves like a Finnish sauna, which is the combination people actually want.

Sizing without the altitude correction

Marrakech sits at about 466 m, so unlike a highland city such as Johannesburg there is no meaningful altitude penalty on the heater. The sum is volume at roughly 0.85 kW per cubic metre of insulated cabin, plus capacity for glass, which loses heat far faster than a wall.

Anything above 8 kW wants a three-phase supply. Morocco's low-voltage network runs 220 V single phase and 380 V three phase in the older standard, 230/400 V in the newer one, and ONEE will tell you which you have.

Glass is where Moroccan projects usually go wrong: a sauna with a full glass wall onto a riad courtyard or a Palmeraie garden loses heat several times faster than a timber wall, so a four-person cabin with one glass wall gets a 9 kW heater where the same box in solid timber would manage with 6. We show the calculation on the drawing, so you can see what the view costs in kilowatts.

Heaters, duty and how the cabin travels

We fit heaters and controls from EOS and Sentiotec, both EU-made. With a certificate of origin they can enter Morocco duty-free under the EU agreement, against MFN rates that start at 2.5 per cent for industrial goods (trade.gov); VAT at 20 per cent still applies (PwC Tax Summaries).

The cabin itself is built and dry-assembled in our Istanbul factory, numbered, crated and shipped to Tanger Med or Casablanca, then installed by our own crew. A single sauna takes 6–10 weeks from drawing approval to commissioning. Indicative bands run from 32 thousand MAD for two people with solid walls to 105 thousand for six people in cedar and glass.

In short

• Atlas cedar walls and screens, thermo-aspen benches for the hot surfaces
• 0.85 kW per m³ plus a correction for glazed area; no altitude penalty at 466 m
• Above 8 kW, three-phase — 220 V single / 380 V three phase on the older ONEE standard
• EU-made EOS or Sentiotec heater; cabin dry-assembled in our factory before shipping