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Hammam Rejuvenation – Istanbul’s Booming Spa Culture Is Revisiting Old Turkish Bathhouse Rituals

A 300-year-old Cagaloglu hammam on Istanbul's European side.

For centuries, pleasure combined with practicality in the hammams, or bathhouses, of Istanbul, where everyone from the humblest worker to the sultan himself regularly kept clean by indulging in the local tradition of a steam bath and professional body scrub. With the rise of modern bathrooms during the past 50 years, the tradition threatened to die out. Private bathing facilities replaced public hammams, and private hammams in the city's great houses became too expensive to maintain. Many of the city's most treasured hammam buildings, often important works of Ottoman architecture, have been converted into everything from cafes to warehouses.

Today, the hammam tradition is coming back in a new form, as the old rituals of steaming and scrubbing take pride of place in Istanbul's booming spa culture. Five-star hotels and upmarket health clubs automatically include strikingly designed hammam facilities in their spa complexes, and a new generation of Istanbul residents are reinterpreting the tradition to suit contemporary needs.

Classic hammams -- often attached to mosques, and built out of traditional white marble from Turkey's Marmara region -- developed an elaborate regimen, with every phase of gradual warming leading up to an intensive body scrub and a final soap massage. The center of a typical bathhouse was a domed room with a large heated stone slab, usually surrounded by cisterns of flowing water. Visitors would lounge on the hot stone, while keeping cool by pouring water over themselves, in preparation for the scrub. Although strictly divided by gender, Istanbul's hammams were also an alternative public space, where the city's vast array of religions, classes, and ethnicities mingled.

A washroom designed by architect Zeynep Fadillioglu features an antique stone kurna (basin) and a mirror from a traditional Turkish hammam.

The new designer hammams, in which the architect often playfully alludes to Ottoman decorative traditions, still offer the traditional scrub, but are refuges of privacy -- tiny by traditional standards, and usually reserved for one person or a couple. Some of the most popular of the new hammams are those in the four-year-old Hotel Les Ottomans, housed in a refurbished Bosphorus mansion; the Swissôtel The Bosphorus, which recently redesigned its hammam in a nontraditional style; and the Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at the Bosphorus, arguably the most luxurious, which opened in 2008.

Today's hammams are seen as "detox treatments," says Viviana Quesada, spa manager at the Four Seasons, who notes that the hammam method of heating and scrubbing now serves as a consummate spa treatment. "It's a whole experience," more complete than a mere sauna and a massage, she says. Ms. Quesada is quick to point out the difference between the rather rough centuries-old massage method, still on offer in Istanbul's surviving public baths, and what the Four Seasons provides in its 2,100 square meter spa. "Outside, the traditional massage is very strong, almost like hitting. Here our concept is more about pampering: long -- not deep -- strokes."

A hammam designed by Sinan Kafader for the Swissôtel The Bosphorus.

Ms. Quesada says that the Four Seasons hammam caters to Istanbul natives, who make up to three-quarters of the spa's customers in the off-season, as well as to the city's visitors. Foreigners, she notices, "are not used to being in a hot treatment for 45 minutes," the usual time for a completed scrub on the elaborate heated stone, while "the locals request even more steam."

A hammam at the Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at the Bosphorus.

Another difference, she says, is the new mixing of genders. "Guests can choose male or female scrubbers," she says -- a dramatic contrast to traditional hammams, where the scrubbers and the scrubbed were always the same sex. Also, a man and a woman can now share a session. "We have a lot of couples requesting to be together," she says. "Even the local Turkish people."

The need to cater to both a Turkish and non-Turkish clientele led the spa's designer, Istanbul architect Sinan Kafadar, to combine a range of styles throughout the spa's spacious rooms. "There are Turkish figures and patterns, but they're hidden," he says, explaining that the spa's domed swimming pool contains a Byzantine-style mosaic. However, once you walk into the actual hammam room, he says, "it's completely Turkish."

Mr. Kafadar, who is the co-director of the Turkish-Italian firm Metex Design Group, also recently redesigned Istanbul's Swissotel spa by getting rid of recognizable Turkish elements in its hammam rooms. By dispensing with the space's traditional octagonal design and substituting a sleek modernist sink design, Mr. Kafadar, preserves the hammam's traditional functions but achieves a radically different, distinctly contemporary atmosphere.

A detail inside the hammam at the Four Seasons

Mr. Kafadar and his firm are responsible for many of the city's leading hammams, and are currently working on the spa and hammam for the spring re-opening of the Pera Palace, Istanbul's legendary belle-epoque hotel. However, he isn't an enthusiastic hammam-goer, limiting himself to a few visits a year. "I like it," he says, "but not regularly."

The same cannot be said of architect Zeynep Fadillioglu, another leading Istanbul hammam designer, who grew up in a yali, or Bosphorus mansion, on Istanbul's European shore, where her family maintained a private hammam. Now a regular customer at the spa and hammam at the Hotel Les Ottomans, which she designed, she describes the whole process as a "a body facial."

"In my childhood, hammams were part of daily life," she says, speaking in the office of her Istanbul firm, ZF Design. "It was the way we cleaned ourselves."

"The main idea is that the middle stone has to be hot," she says, noting that the private hammams often were heated with wood and required monitoring by a vigilant staff of servants. "The hot atmosphere makes you mildly relaxed, so you are ready for the scrub."

Ms. Fadillioglu, now 54 years old, says that good scrubbers are as sought after as good hairdressers, and that, in the Istanbul of her youth, an exfoliated look was a sign of prestige. "The ladies all used to have pink skin," she says.

Ms. Fadillioglu also designs new domestic hammams for a select group of private clients, in which she makes modifications that reflect the tremendous cost and bother of maintaining the heated room. The hammams she now designs, she says, are "mostly with a twist," describing one hammam that features heatable marble benches rather than a more traditional, more cumbersome central stone.

Ms. Fadillioglu, who helped revive the eclectic Ottoman style in the 1990s, also uses traditional hammam interiors as an inspiration for bathroom design, as well as design details elsewhere in the home. She uses hammam-style bathroom sinks, in both antique and newly produced versions, in many commissions, and is especially fond of pestemals, the traditional wraps used instead of bathrobes. "The old ones are fantastic," she says, and she regularly looks for antique hammam textiles, which can be made of either silk or cotton, in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. "I use them for cushions," she says.

A twist on traditional hammam culture is also behind the success of Jayda Uras, a Welsh-Turkish aroma therapist who opened her own apothecary shop, Vie en Rose, in Istanbul's hip Cihangir district two years ago. "We work like a bakery," she says, of her business, which features products like organic Turkish-coffee-and-rose facial scrub and custom-mixed herbal honeys, all made on site. Ms. Uras, a trained architect, currently works closely with hammams in Bursa, a three-hour drive from Istanbul and home to some of Turkey's best hot springs, and an eco-resort in Bodrum in southern Turkey. Both complexes use her products in conjunction with hammam treatments. "Because of the way essential oils work," she says, it's "important to use a heated environment" for the oils to penetrate the skin.

Istanbul's spa-like hammams have spread their influence to more traditional hammam settings, says Mary Senyuz, an American-born Istanbul resident and avid hammam-goer. Ms. Senyuz, an English teacher, regularly goes to a 300-year-old hammam, located on the city's Asian side, which is still connected to a mosque. Marked by an atmosphere that she calls "faded elegance" her local hammam costs her no more than 58 lira (€28), about a quarter of what visitors pay at the Four Seasons.

"It's set up very traditionally," she says, laughing out loud at the suggestion that there might be male scrubbers working on days when the bathhouse is reserved for women. But lately, she has noticed a change. Hammam-going, she says, has become "the healthy thing to do among a lot of the younger generation who have never been to a hammam before." She says that her local hammam began to offer oil massages about a year ago -- something she had never seen before in her decades of hammam-going; she chalks this up to the influence of the upscale hotel hammam-spas.

The cumulative effect of monthly exfoliation treatments has kept her skin remarkably soft, she says: "My skin is used to the hammam. Once you start going regularly, then you kind of need to go. You're trapped."