ISH SHOW 2016 NEW INFORAMTION

Custom-sized bathroom furniture and plenty of colour for more individuality

For customers in search of made-to-measure solutions – perhaps for cabinets built into alcoves, room dividers, benches, or shelves that cover the entire wall – leading bathroom furniture manufacturers offer
custom-sized components or even entire segments especially for individually adaptable furniture systems.

A particularly wide choice of colours is available for finishes, which can be selected in virtually any variation you can think of. In some cases they can even be replaced with something different if customers decide they don’t like their cabinet fronts after a few years. In line with general furnishing trends, varnishes, lacquers and coatings are available in everything from high gloss to ultra matt (fingerprint-proof, naturally), all the way to knotted grains for the wood designs. And nowadays tiles don’t just come in all kinds of wood effects, textures and used looks, but in various formats and motifs for laying all sorts of patterns too – from ship’s deck to herringbone to linear mosaic.

Cutting-edge technology in the bathroom for individual needs

But customising certain elements of the furnishings isn’t the only way for individualism to manifest itself in the bathroom. Personalisation can take place behind the scenes as well: in the bits and bytes that regulate the individual settings for fittings, lighting and sound systems.

Individualisation represents the complete reversal of a concept that, in the early days of modernism, was regarded as the ultimate in progress and prestige: standardisation. This presents manufacturers and designers of sophisticated bathroom products and bathrooms with various challenges. Run-of-the-mill goods and stereotyped thinking have to be replaced with intelligent products, customising systems and continuing training for staff so that they can tailor the advice they give to the individual customer. But new concepts are needed too: concepts that integrate our digital way of life, liberate the bathroom from its tightly laced corset and open it up to the possibilities of individual design. In the long-term, this will also result in shorter lifecycles for bathroom furnishings and equipment.