Worlds apart yet connected through materials
Two bathrooms, built 80 years and almost 7,000 miles apart, share an austerity which I find very cool. Some might call them cold — in one case that might be viewed as a blessing (you’ll see why) — but, for me, that’s not the point. What drew my attention is the way each architect/designer pared a clutter-magnet space back to essential surfaces. Both bathrooms use local materials – tile and stone – to speak for themselves. In that sense they are modern, relevant and timeless. Neither could easily be dated and storage has been worked out so that it doesn’t interfere with either design, which always seems like the essence of elegance.
New York based designer Paul Mathieu renovated a second home in Udaipur, India, where he preserved the tradition of lime-plaster interior walls and niches. His bathroom employs local Nimbara stone for the tub, sink, floor and typical niches. In any other climate this type might be considered a shiver-worthy space but considering the stewpot nature of Indian weather it looks quite refreshing.
If the tile in this Art Deco bath looks familiar, you may be remembering our Tile Masterpiece bathroom. Bespoke Pewabic Pottery tile, from Detroit, Michigan is something of a national treasure, with a very specific look. For the master bath in Saarinen House on the campus of the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan the seminal Finnish architect and furniture designer Eliel Saarinen used monochrome Pewabic tiles.
He also used a dark pencil liner to create a subtle vertical grid that resembles the leaded glass window facing onto the courtyard of the house – thus imbuing the bath with an important motif, echoed in the black and white bathmat woven by his wife, Loja, which takes center stage. Saarinen evidently considered the bathroom important enough to interpret the window panel motif in tile. So I wonder what an avant garde architect might have been thinking about bathroom design back in 1930, when the house was completed and whether the notion of adding a decorative window in the bathroom would have come up at all.
