Gross Archive

London Builders: Bathroom In Wood. Part One.


For many years there occurs in a modern bathroom a silent battle between necessary practicalities and designers' ideas. Now and again people place there something out of the common. One of the demonstrative examples of this kind might be a bathtub, made of a natural wood. By some reason, we believe that water and wood are incompatible. But let's remember ancient small tubs, casks and troughs. Well, we might consider a wooden bathtub a distant descendant of its archaic ancestors, and it looks into the future with quite confidence.
Surely, wood is not too fit for making bathroom fixtures, but a general trend to sacrifice more functionality for glamorous exterior brought blocks of rich woods back to circulation. Moreover, a certain role was played by a change in the social outlook, and by the aspiration to bring to one's life more of naturalness and, of course, a fashion for all real. As a result, wood has become a terrific lure for effeminate consumer. A possibility to have in one's bathroom a rare, stylish and actually symbolic object has totally compensated for some non-practicality and complicity of care.
Not only wooden bathtub, but stylish bathtub.
During several last centuries practically all the vessels, which crossed the expanses of the seas and oceans of the Earth, were being built only from wood. This centuries old experience was picked up by the modern producers of wooden bathtubs. They use for their production only those species of woods, which naturally possess a high stability towards moister attack, like teak wood blocks, mahogany, wenge wood, larch, i. e. those, which historically were most valued by shipbuilders. A costly and sophisticated modern bathroom technology, with the help of which the bathtubs are protected from ruinous impact of moisture, is a fruit of handling development for ships and yachts hulls. A special chic is in trying to preserve wood in its primeval beauty, to minimize all perceptible coatings. Smooth and streamlined, these bathtubs are made from excellently fitting fragments, they are polished and in some cases covered with additional varnish, and as a result, they form an absolutely whole structure. A beautiful texture of the block becomes a further decorative factor. Naturally, every producer keeps the details in secret.
But some secrets leak out.
Bathtubs by their exterior often remind graceful barks and yachts. An interesting fact: one of Italian factories, which in its time built yachts, was now retrofitted to produce bathtubs!
Very logical that this very outline has become one of the most popular among designers. These bath tubs are especially good for new bathroom designs, styled in such popular now trends as Zen, ambient and minimalism. They not only daintily accomplish the interior, but called in the first place to attract major attention namely to themselves, and they are the main style-forming factor in the bathroom all in all. Usually, such a bathtub is placed in the middle of a bathroom, often on a podium, so as to arrest the attention of all who enter.
The other rather widespread types are massive rectangular bathtubs, performed from a block of natural wood, or specially treated plywood. It might seem at the first glance that they must be not that comfortable, but it's not true. In order that a person felt comfy inside such a fairly hard and deep rectangular structure, a smoothly bent bed with a headrest is placed there.

500
Leave a comment...