Traditional hammams in Morocco, with a heated marble slab

The slab and the heat under it

The heated marble slab is the room. It runs at 40-45 °C on the surface, heated from below by a water loop or an electric mat set into the screed, and the whole session happens on it. Getting the temperature even is the craft: the loop spacing tightens at the edges because the perimeter loses heat to the room, and a slab that is warm in the middle and cold at the rim is the commonest fault in hammams built without a heat-loss calculation.

Around it the air sits at 40-50 °C and high humidity — warm, not scalding. That is why people stay an hour, and why a hammam works for a household where a 90 °C sauna would be used by one person.

Zellige is cut, not laid

Real zellige is glazed terracotta chipped to shape by hand, one piece at a time, and assembled face-down into a geometric pattern. It is slow, it is expensive, and it looks nothing like the printed tile sold as zellige. We specify it from Fès cutters and show you the cut pieces before anything goes on a wall.

Where the budget will not carry full zellige, we use it as a band or a niche against tadelakt rather than spreading it thin. A small area of the real thing beats a whole room of the substitute.

Domes, light and water

A pierced dome throws the traditional points of light across the steam. In a Moroccan house we build it as a shallow dome with fibre optics rather than cutting holes in a roof that has to survive winter rain on the Atlantic coast or in the Atlas foothills.

The floor falls to a central drain at 1:50, the benches are warm, and every fitting is brass because it patinates instead of pitting. Chrome in a hammam looks tired in three years.

What comes from the factory and what is laid on site

The steam generator, controls, marble slab, basins and bench frames are made or fitted in our Istanbul factory, where hammam floors have been part of the work since 1987 — including the hammam on the Sofitel Thalassa spa floor in Algiers. They arrive crated, numbered and checked.

The tanking, the zellige and any tadelakt happen in your house, at the pace those materials allow. A single hammam runs 6–10 weeks from drawing approval to commissioning; the indicative band is 95 to 260 thousand MAD depending on zellige area and whether there is a dome. Send us the room plan and we return an itemised quote.

In short

• Heated marble slab at 40–45 °C, loop spacing tightened at the perimeter
• Hand-cut zellige from Fès cutters — you approve the pieces before they are set
• Shallow dome with fibre optics instead of roof penetrations
• Brass throughout, honed stone underfoot, floor falls 1:50 to a central drain