Coastal and island sauna builds across Africa

The route is surveyed before the price

Before we price an awkward site we follow the path from the last point a truck can reach to the cabin's final position — in person, or with you on a video call — photographing each obstacle and measuring the narrowest one.

Everything else is designed backwards from that measurement. A cabin that travels in three sections to a flat suburban plot may travel in six through the lanes of Stone Town, up the granite steps of a Glacis hillside or inside a Lagos service lift — see boulder and hillside sites in the Seychelles. The joints are engineered for it, and the carrying is priced on its own line so two quotes can be compared honestly.

One shipment, packed once

When a project crosses water, all of it travels together: panels, heater, controls, chiller, hoses, filters, fixings, sealant, tiles, drainage parts and the tools to install them. It is packed in our factory against a signed checklist, with extra of the small things that always go missing.

The cabin has already been assembled in full on the factory floor and checked before it is numbered and crated, so on site it goes together rather than being made to fit. The crates land at the main port — Port Victoria, Port Louis, Dar es Salaam or Mombasa — and the onward barge or ferry is booked to meet them.

Marine specification, item by item

• A4 stainless for every fixing, hidden ones included.
• End grain sealed before assembly.
• A ventilated void under every cabin, never a floor laid flat on a terrace.
• Drained and vented cavities instead of sealed ones.
• A housed, filtered enclosure for the chiller and pumps.
• Titanium in the chiller's heat exchanger.
• A service visit every three months with a corrosion check.

With all seven in place salt becomes routine maintenance. Leave one out and the clock starts. It is the same discipline that went into the sauna, steam room, hammam and salt wall on the seawater-therapy floor of the Sofitel Thalassa in Algiers.

Wind, cyclones and uplift

In Mauritius any outdoor structure is anchored to an engineer's signed design, because the cyclone season from November to May demands it. The island detail is on the Mauritius cyclone engineering page. On monsoon coasts elsewhere, roofs and decks are fixed against uplift rather than simply resting on their own weight, thatch is tied down, and plant is kept out of the line of spray.

There is nothing exotic in any of it — it is sound coastal practice, and it decides whether a deck is still standing after a hard season. Send us a photo of the plot and of the path to it; we reply with the access line and a first budget.

In short

• Route to the plot surveyed and photographed before we price
• Panels sized to the narrowest point; carrying priced on its own line
• Everything in one crated shipment, packed to a signed checklist
• Seven-point marine specification, and signed anchorage where required