An illustrator and a connoisseur of Japanese Art asked us to refurbish and transform their bathroom on the upper ground floor of their mid-Victorian house
Such a small project needed a big surreal concept. We imagined intimate renewal of body and mind set within cosmic immensity: a wooden bathing platform, afloat in a deep space, equipped with satellite-like accessories.
The bath sits in a honed black slate plane continuous horizontally with the seat of a vertically boarded window bench. This bench is also a linen trunk. The bathroom floor, full height sliding door and built-in furniture are of Douglas Fir - a reassuring warm, pinkish-brown timber - while the walls are of polished indigo Tadelakt plaster, dissolving into an ambiguously reflective distance. Opposite the sliding door is a new sash window, the only source of natural light. Its lower pane is translucent, its upper transparent. Daytime bathers see sky and the outside world framed like a picture; by night, they see neighbours’ rooms hanging like bright oblong planets in the darkness.
