Steam room and hammam builders across Africa

Waterproofing the box

The slab and walls are tanked with a liquid membrane carried up past the ceiling line and reinforced at every corner. The screed falls at no less than 1:50 to the drain. The ceiling is pitched three to five degrees, or domed, so drips run down the walls rather than onto bathers.

Leaks start where materials meet: membrane to old blockwork, to a door frame, a bench bracket, a light or the steam head. Those junctions are slow to detail and easy to rush. In Stone Town, a Marrakech riad or a Creole house in Victoria the walls also soak up water, so the detailing is most of the skill and much of the price.

Extract sized for wet air

After each session a fan must change the air several times over and exhaust it outdoors, switched by a humidistat rather than a timer. A timer has no idea how humid a Lagos afternoon or a Zanzibar evening is; a humidistat keeps running until the room is actually dry.

The fault we find most in existing steam rooms is an extract that ends in the ceiling void. It is worse than none: it pumps saturated air straight into the structure, where the damage stays hidden until the ceiling fails.

Hammams in North Africa

In Morocco, Egypt and the rest of North Africa the steam room becomes a hammam: air at 40–50 °C and a heated marble or stone slab at 40–45 °C that bathers lie on for the best part of an hour. On the seawater-therapy floor of the Sofitel Thalassa in Algiers we built one in 2022, alongside a sauna, a steam room and a salt wall.

It is the heaviest and most expensive of the wet rooms and the one guests remember. Marble and mosaic come from our own factory; tadelakt and zellige are commissioned from craftspeople who do nothing else, and we name them in the quote. The country versions are the traditional hammam in Morocco and the hammam in Egypt.

Water chemistry and the generator

Supply ranges from municipal to borehole to harvested rain, and hardness can change from one street to the next. Hard water furs a steam generator within months; soft rainwater spares it but can attack some tank materials.

So we test the water at the house before choosing the generator. The result fixes the descaling interval in your service plan, and where the water is truly hard we add softening on the feed, which is cheaper than replacing elements.

From our factory to a finished room

The generator, controls, doors, benches, marble and mosaic are prepared in our factory and crated with a fixing and sealing kit; your builder tanks and screeds to our drawing, and our crew installs, commissions and hands over. A single steam room takes six to ten weeks after drawing approval, plus shipping, and carries a 24-month warranty.

Send the room size and a photo of the space on WhatsApp; we answer with an itemised quote within one business day.

In short

• Continuous membrane detailed into coral, lime and old blockwork
• Humidistat extract ducted outdoors — never into a ceiling void
• Hammam with a heated slab where the building tradition calls for it
• Water tested at the property before the generator is chosen