Modern and designer bathrooms: from modern icons to Japanese inspiration
In the contemporary home, the bathroom represents the space in which to give time exclusively to one’s well-being and self-care. The attention of the best designers to this environment, as much in the aspect of comfort as in the formal and material aspect, has resulted in the bathroom becoming one of the most sophisticated and scenic spaces in the home: from the bathroom fixtures that look like sculptures to the faucets designed with extreme attention to form and detail. The best technologies deliver spa-worthy sensory experiences, but it is above all the elegance of the furnishings that populate a modern bathroom that restores true moments of luxury.
Agape Angelo Mangiarotti: the modern bathroom by definition
Architect, urban planner, designer, and sculptor, Angelo Mangiarotti was one of the masters of Modernism. His works arise from a tireless search for synthesis and design appropriateness, which are expressed as much in his architectural composition as in his design works. In Agape’s Mangiarotti collection, the choice of materials enhances the sensuality of sculptural forms, while expressive formal sensibility is combined with rigorous functionalism and the rationality of the industrial process.
Bjhon washbasins, created from a garden planter design and made of white biobased Cristalplant® or marble, are true functional sculptures. The truncated conical column contains the central drain and support the basin, but the basin can be used individually on the tops of other Agape collections.
Lito sinks, carved from white Carrara marble, transform the bathroom into a museum space. Lito 1 is characterized by an inverted “L” shape and a particularly soft basin; Lito 2, ergonomic and perfectly proportioned, appears to be a skillful reinterpretation of the more traditional hand basin; Lito 3, the latest variation on the theme, features a dynamic, angular shape.
The indispensable ritual of Japanese tradition in Bisazza’s nendo collection
In Japan, the neighborhood public bath (sentō) was a place where locals could soak in a tub and socialize with their neighbors. Oki Sato, founder of the Japanese design studio Nendo, created a collection of products for Bisazza Bagno based on the idea that the furniture and objects in the collection looked like “all together in the bathtub,” as in an inanimate sentō.
The faucets are located inside the sink and bathtub, immersed in water along with accessories such as soap dish or tumbler. A tray inside the sink becomes an island for items that need to be kept dry. The washstand cabinet is a simple wooden frame, through which the water pipe goes up from the floor to the faucet. The glass of the mirror, characterized by voids, is reminiscent of the thermal water mirrors typical of Japanese onsen.
The Nendo Collection includes a larch wood tub, washbasin, shelves, mirrors, towel racks, clocks, and stackable containers, and each item is designed to function in multiples, in a variety of possible functions. Containers, for example, can be used as much for storage as for planters.
Construction technology becomes an elegant graphic sign in Boffi’s R.I.G. Collection
MA / U Studio specializes in the creation of innovative, highly engineered furniture and shelving systems for the home, work and hospitality industries, with the goal of creating simple yet aesthetically appealing products that can flexibly adapt to the changing uses and purposes of modern living environments.
R.I.G. (Rudimentary Interior Geometry) is a universal modular shelving and shelf system based on a slender, linear, stainless steel structural grid that, in the version specifically designed for the bathroom, composes a solid frame made of uprights, rods, stabilizers and supports for shelves, tops, fronts, panels and countertop sinks. The metal elements are also developed as structures for mirrors and towel racks and allow for highly customizable wall or island compositions thanks to the wide range of materials, colors and finishes available for tops and shelves: lacquered, wood, marble, glass, MDI and Corian®, from marble to stone to glass.
With R.I.G., the bathroom area is revitalized and becomes an elegant space of great formal characterization.
The romantic bath of Antonio Lupi
A proposal that is anything but minimal, a vaguely nostalgic but absolutely current echo, a romantic and aristocratic style that combines the formal cleanliness and attention to detail typical of Antonio Lupi with a reworking of noble content from the past: this is Roberto Lazzeroni’s Il Bagno collection for Antonio Lupi. It is a family of scenic objects, populating a bourgeois and fun bathroom with classic forms and soft lines: console and furniture in American walnut, wall sconces, mirrors, accessories, faucets, vases and bidets, a bathtub with legs, and ornate glass shower stalls.
The excellence of workmanship and materials used emerges from the materiality of wood and the skillful use of lacquered color.
There is a clear reference to the sophisticated design of the 1960s: the mirrors, for example, are a tribute to the Tuscan company’s past, when it specialized in the production, precisely, of mirrors.
