What will the bathroom of the future look like? Tom Dixon knows…
The trajectory of the bathroom is going from it being a purely functional space – private, hidden away and never shared, where your biggest luxury might have been a bar of Imperial Leather soap – to somewhere that you pamper yourself and others. Maybe you invite people in to chat, whether you are having a bath or doing your make-up before going out. Maybe it can incorporate other things, like your wardrobe or tropical-plant collection. It’s about making the bathroom less of a space behind a door and more of a place that functions as a design object in itself.
Bathrooms have increasingly been put to all kinds of uses. During the pandemic, some people used them as an office or a phone booth – a place to get away from the kids! The only quiet space in the house. These are interesting shifts in behaviour that have real design potential.
One thing it brought to mind was how the kitchen evolved from hugging the wall to commanding space in the home with an island. It became not just an enclosed space with a particular purpose, but a more heroic and social area that is functional and also entertaining. I think it’s a shame to hide a room that is becoming an increasingly important part of how we look after ourselves or how we relax.
Obviously, you need privacy for some bathroom functions (let’s not talk about those!), but others – like washing your hands or checking your face in the mirror – can be much more exposed. With the ‘Metamorphic’ exhibition in Milan we were translating these ideas into something monumental, but eventually we can get to a point where we can squeeze the concept into a realistic domestic space, making some of the essentials (the toilet and shower, perhaps) innies and some of them outies – if you know what I mean.
My biggest frustration, though, is how complicated it is to put a bathroom together in the first place. It has so many different trades installing it – plumbers, electricians, tilers – and you have to go to multiple places to purchase all the elements… it just seems so clumsy as a way of assembling things. I believe the designer’s job is to simplify and make things more seamless. Right now, in some new-build projects the bathroom is craned into position as a prefabricated, factory-made module. I had a thought, which was: ‘Okay, what if there was
a more attractive prefab module?’
I don’t think a bathroom should be that trendy a space, especially when it comes to the fixtures and fittings. When you put these things in you don’t want to be changing them every time avocado goes out of fashion. Instead, I like the ideas of generosity and permanence. My bathroom range for VitrA [the ‘Liquid’ collection released in 2021] explored both. It took some inspiration from the pipes and fixtures of Victorian civic bathrooms that still exist to this day. Roman baths were definitely something I was thinking of when designing the Cosentino exhibition, with its fonts showing the possibilities of Dekton, a material that is totally water resistant. There’s a limit to how public you want all of your ablutions to be, though – they had communal toilets in ancient Rome and I don’t think we are ready for that concept to come back!
With Cosentino, we are looking at other projects that build on some of the thinking about the future of the bathroom that we explored in that exhibition, and I am hoping there will be a second collection for VitrA on the horizon. With all of these things, particularly if you’re doing it for the first time, you learn so much along the way that can furnish your thinking going forward. Bathrooms will remain interesting to us because they are an intrinsic part of every interior, but there is room for real progress.
