Guest Sauna, Level 52 - Shangri-La at The Shard

A complete sauna installation with associated tiling, plumbing, electrical and decoration works, delivered on the 52nd floor of one of Europe's tallest buildings — in a five-star hotel that never closed for a single night

Project Guest sauna construction and associated fit-out

Location Shangri-La at The Shard, London SE1 — level 52

Sector Hospitality / five-star hotel

Our role Specialist subcontractor

Value Approximately £80,000

Completed 2019

Building status Fully occupied and trading throughout

The brief

Shangri-La at The Shard wanted a guest sauna added to its wellness offering on level 52. The scope covered the sauna itself plus everything around it: tiling, plumbing, electrical installation and decoration to five-star hotel finish standards.

The build itself was the straightforward part. The conditions were not.

The constraints

• A hotel that never closed. The building was fully occupied and trading for the entire programme. Guests were staying on the floors above and below, paying five-star rates, throughout. Noise windows were restricted, and anything that could be heard in a guest room had to happen inside them.

• Level 52. Every sheet of board, every bag of adhesive, every tile and every offcut of waste moved by service lift, on a booking system shared with hotel operations. There is no such thing as nipping down to the van. Material scheduling stopped being an administrative task and became the thing the programme lived or died on.

• Five-star tolerance on finishes. Hotel guests looking at wet-area tiling from a metre away notice things a domestic client never would. Setting out had to be right first time because there was no comfortable way to rip out and redo at that height.

• Working through occupied public areas. Access routes ran through spaces guests were using. Protection went down and came up daily, and the site had to disappear at the end of every shift

How we approached it

Sequencing & Permits. Work was scheduled around stringent hotel operating hours, coordinating daily with building management through formal permit-to-work and hot works systems. High-noise operations were restricted to pre-agreed morning windows to ensure zero guest disturbance.

• Vertical Logistics. All deliveries and waste removals were timed to dedicated 30-minute service lift slots outside guest check-in hours. Materials were batched and staged precisely according to installation phases to keep floor areas clear and compliant with fire escape regulations.

• Wet-Area Detailing & Substrates. Substrates were reinforced and waterproofed using multi-layer tanking membranes tested thoroughly before tiling commenced. Falls to floor gulleys were set out with zero margin for error to guarantee complete drainage in high-humidity commercial usage.

• Site Discretion. Full temporary dust screening and heavy-duty floor protection were maintained across all access corridors, with daily HEPA extraction vacuuming to leave corridors spotless after every shift

The result

The sauna suite was completed on schedule to Shangri-La's five-star standard, fully commissioned with zero guest complaints during the installation period.

Most of our work is residential — London homes, extensions, loft conversions, bespoke joinery. But the standards we work to came from projects like this one.

A hotel on the 52nd floor teaches you things a domestic job never will: how to sequence work around people who are living in the space, how to protect finished areas properly, how to keep a site clean enough that nobody notices you're there, and how to get a wet-area detail right the first time. We apply the same approach to a bathroom in East Ham as we did to a sauna at The Shard.

Planning a commercial fit-out or refurbishment? Call 020 7476 2770 or email info@sharpline-construction-ltd.co.uk