The space of the bathroom, increasingly cozy and domestic thanks in part to the influence of the adjacent furnishings, tends to mutate into a little spa, definitively leaving behind that patina of austerity that derives from assigning to it a merely functional role, a space where one quickly conducts one’s private business without the barest minimum of narcissistic enjoyment.
Today, ceramic bath fixtures, though far behind furniture, is discovering a less frigid, more narrative dimension, to the extent that we are witnessing the diffusion of color, patterns and rich materials for every surface.
In Hariri&Hariri’s Crystalline collection for Rapsel, they seem to pursue a mineral organicism, almost recalling the words of Gio Ponti, ‘Architecture is a crystal‘. Tactile and material sensations, until recently prohibited, enter the realm of the bathroom, as we see in Dressage by Ambrogio Matteo Nespoli and Alberto Novara for Graff.
Memory is at the forefront in the re-proposals of the classic bathroom from companies which historically had similar products in their catalogues, a phenomenon much like the aforementioned furniture re-editions, or designed from scratch while still adhering to this theme. Nendo, for example, with Lampshower, designed for Axor, incorporates light into a nostalgic structure.
A return to the past that doesn’t exclude the dimension of play, as in Cook, a particularly successful high faucet by the young emerging group Sovrappensiero for Mamoli, which seems to emphasize the detail of a garden hose.
A general overview that doesn’t exclude signs of a minimalism with functionalist roots that endures but becomes very controlled, almost tending to absolutism, as in Jasper Morrison’s Bonola washbasin for Ceramica Flaminia.
