Hasta La Ideas

We may not pay attention to our bathrooms very often, but the truth is they’re the little alcoves we spend a substantial amount of our time in, carrying out our personal activities. It’s probably the only time we’re ever truly alone, and bathrooms are like our own personal zones. Hence amping up our bathroom with essential accessories and handy product designs is quite important. These little products can make a huge difference in our everyday bathroom experience. They not only help us carry out our personal and grooming activities even more easily, but they also help us take care of ourselves and our washrooms a little better! From an unconventional weighing scale designed to look like a set of tiles to a smart eco-friendly shower with a pressure-sensitive floor panel – we’ve curated a whole collection of innovative and functional bathroom accessories for you!

1. Air Spa

BDCI Design designed ‘Air Spa’…a body dryer! The tall vertical appliance blows out air to dry your body after you take a shower. Air Spa also protects your body from external temperature and humidity and maintains your body temperature. So, you know those few minutes after a shower when you’re feeling super cold before you wipe yourself down with a towel? Well, Air Spa completely eliminates those dreadful few minutes. It also eliminates the tedious task of adding your towel to the laundry and washing it.

2. Smart Shower

Designer Natasha Jadhav decided to create a ‘Smart Shower’. This shower is truly smart, interactive, and not to mention aesthetically pleasing too! Jadhav struck the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality with this design. Jadhav’s smart shower consists of the actual shower on the ceiling of the bathroom, a sleek white console that holds panels, and a hand shower, as well as a pressure-sensitive panel on the floor.

3. The Tiles Weight Scale

The Tiles Weight Scale looks like a panel of your quintessential ceramic bathroom tiles. They aren’t made from ceramic, which means they aren’t slippery, and the white panel has an LED display that shines through the material, activating the moment you stand on it. That way, it serves its purpose wonderfully when it needs to, and blends right into the bathroom’s decor when not in use! With a glossy, tiled design, the product fits perfectly into the contemporary bathroom, looking more like functional decor than an appliance.

4. Lucere

Lucere mimics that perfect vanity-lighting experience without racking up an electricity bill. It features a pair of portable lights that attach directly to your bathroom mirror to give you bright, bi-directional light without casting sharp shadows. The Lucere comes with a mount that adheres to your mirror, allowing you to magnetically snap the lights on or off whenever you need them. Both the lights come with touch-sensitive on-off switches and the ability to set them at your desired brightness using simple +/- controls. The lights charge via a standard MicroUSB cable and last for 3 hours on medium brightness.

5. The Shower Scrubber

While Konjac sponges aren’t new (the internet’s absolutely littered with them), the Shower Scrubber unlocks its true potential with its design and the various infusions. The large guitar-pick-shaped design comes with a honeycomb texture on one side, inspired by Casamera’s waffle-textured towels. The honeycomb texture helps gently massage and pamper the skin (especially around the face), open the pores, and more importantly, is incredibly effective at building up a lather. The other side, however, is a textural contrast, as the sponge comes with particles of walnut shells suspended within the surface, offering an exfoliating experience that’s great at removing dead skin on your body to reveal shining, supple, radiant skin underneath.

6. BrushPro

Designer Geraldine Tong wanted to change our perception of toilet cleaning tools while also solving related issues like its environmental impact and the clutter it creates in our bathrooms. Her goal was to create a brush that didn’t cause more landfill waste, took minimal space, reached the narrow areas, and of course, look visually appealing – so she designed BrushPro in collaboration with Lam Soon Singapore, and the mission was accomplished. This redesigned toilet brush lets you switch out brushes while reusing the main body which reduces a lot of toxic waste. BrushPro is extremely convenient to use compared to its forerunners. The extendable handle allows you to reach narrow spaces without having to perform advanced yoga poses on the floor and minimizes your direct contact with the dirty brush.

7. K-25 Smart Bath

Design similar to our breakfast favorite waffle comes with a load of benefits. The waffle texture gently exfoliates your skin, while the waffle honeycombs help the towel easily absorb all the water in one quick pass. It also dries itself twice faster, thanks to an airy weave and breathability. Being surprisingly lightweight, but feels thick, fluffy, and soft to the skin. Great for the hair too, as it soaks all the moisture quickly eliminating the frizz. The towels are generously sized, so you can easily wipe your entire body with them, and comfortably wrap it around your waist when you’re done.

8. The BBalance Mat

Combining the bathroom mat and the bathroom scale into one product, the BBalance Mat will tell you your weight while keeping your bathroom floor dry… but it does more than just that. Outfitted with a body-composition scale, a posture analyzer, and even a sensor to recognize your footprint (so it works for all the members of your house), the BBalance Mat gives you an in-depth analysis of your health just as you step out of the bath. The mat immediately recognizes you as you step on it, calculates your weight, body composition, BMI, posture, and balance, giving you a comprehensive look at your body’s stats from day to day. Oh, and since it senses your feet, it’ll also tell you which shoe size you are, just as a nifty little added benefit!

9. JoyFous

JoyFous takes the existing shower curtain and gives it a much-needed design upgrade. Made for 3-walled bathtubs (where the 4th wall is usually occupied by a curtain), JoyFous is a nifty, slim, retractable screen that’s easy to pull out and retract before and after your bath. It’s a much more convenient alternative to the shower curtain that’s clumsy and doesn’t stop water from leaking out onto the bathroom floor… and it’s a whole lot cheaper than those frosted glass partitions, and it isn’t breakable or fragile too! Working much like retractable blinds that you pull downward, JoyFous operates sideways, creating a neat privacy-partition while you bathe or just laze in your bath-salts solution with some candles and bubbly… and its unique water-dam feature keeps the water inside your bathtub, so you don’t step out onto a soaking wet and slippery bathroom floor.

10. The Kohler Moxie Showerhead

Kohler seems to have taken a massive liking to bathroom singers with its new showerhead. With a halo-shaped design, the Kohler Moxie Showerhead allows you to fit a wireless speaker into its negative cavity, giving you a luxurious Kohler-worthy shower with handpicked (or rather voice-picked) tunes to accompany you as you bathe. Now the Moxie isn’t a new product. Kohler released the quirky showerhead+speaker combination in as early as 2012, but the new update (to be showcased at CES2020 next week) allows Moxie to communicate with Amazon’s Alexa voice AI, allowing you to ask it to play songs (or karaokes), brief you on the news, or order you some more shampoo. The Moxie speaker is detachable and docks right into the torus-shaped showerhead using magnetic action.

The post Innovative product designs to provide you with the ultimate bathroom experience first appeared on Yanko Design.

Scandinavian firm CF Møller Architects has completed a house where all the exterior surfaces match, thanks to a combination of dark red bricks and tiles.

Located in Risskov, in the north of Danish city Aarhus, Villa E is a home for a couple with four children and a dog.

The 261-square-metre building takes its cues from the nearby Aarhus University, designed by CF Møller back in 1931, with its gabled roof profiles and rustic materials palette.

The aim was replicate the university’s “simplicity and straightforward use of local materials”, according to architect and CF Møller partner Klaus Toustrup.

“The clients used Aarhus University as an example of a building which had achieved the timelessness they wanted from their new home,” he told Dezeen.

“They were very fond of classic brick buildings and were looking for a design that would blend in nicely into the surroundings.”

Villa E consists of four overlapping gabled volumes, with two oriented north-south and the other two running east-west.

Hand-painted tiles clad both the facade and roof of all four blocks. With varying shades of red, they match up with two brick entrance staircases and a series of exterior terraces.

Brick surfaces continue inside the building, providing select walls and floor surfaces. The more dominant interior material is oak, which also lines the window and door recesses.

By dividing the building into four blocks, CF Møller was able to more easily negotiate the sloping levels of the site.

Some blocks are set at different levels, creating a split-level floor plan inside the building and making it possible for the basement to incorporate a sunken garage.

“The biggest challenge was to create a design that could naturally handle the hilly terrain,” said Toustrup.

“The concept of dividing the building into ‘four small houses’ that could be moved between each other offered the solution and at the same time divided the villa into different family and living zones.”

Most of the living spaces are located on the upper ground floor. A south-facing kitchen and dining room is the heart of the floor plan, with five bedrooms and a lounge organised around it.

The lower level includes utility areas and a hobby room, along with the garage.

Various features have been added in order to bring daylight through the home. These include a glazed gable wall fronting the lounge, a curving lightwell above the kitchen and a narrow skylight above the main stairwell.

This staircase also has open risers, to help light reach the lower level.

Oak flooring features throughout the home, laid in a herringbone pattern. The bathroom introduces another material: a natural grey stone that offers a contrast to the warmth of the clay and wood surfaces.

While CF Møller is best known for large-scale projects like Maersk Tower at the University of Copenhagen or the recently completed Carlsberg HQ, the studio often takes on private residential projects.

It recently also unveiled an “invisible villa” set into a hillside, with a green roof on top.

With Villa E, Toustrup hopes to have created a building that is “simple, elegant and timeless”.

“The big room with the curved ceiling has a beautiful natural light, while the materials create a calm and cozy atmosphere,” he said.

“It has become a great place for both partying and everyday family life.”

Photography is by Julian Weyer.

Project credits

Architect: CF Møller Architects
Contractor: Jakob Tømrerfirma
Engineer: Tri-Consult
Suppliers: Petersen Tegl, Krone Vinduer

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Founded roughly 100 years ago in a small town near Cologne (with a Milan-based “style center” opened in 1991), Ichendorf Milano blends traditional glassware techniques with modern design. In their Travasi Decanter, the silhouette takes on a circular, poetic shape that—when paired with the material’s complete transparency—heightens the beauty of the glass. Capable of holding 64 fluid ounces, this refined decanter elegantly balances and endures time.

Rather than spending £20 million to refurbish its headquarters, RIBA should make its spaces freely available for others to host engaging architectural programmes, says Phineas Harper.

Barely a week goes by without hearing an architect complaining about the RIBA. Griping over the 184-year-old Royal Institute of British Architects has become the background noise of life in the profession – the inevitable exasperated segway of every pub debate and predictable punchline of all industry jokes.

The frustrations of its detractors are understandable. RIBA enjoys an income of £21 million, employs over 300 staff, and owns combined assets worth north of a quarter of a billion quid.

RIBA should be an irrepressible force for positive change

It is in a completely different league to every other architecture charity in the country, able to deploy resources and take risks most organisations can only dream of. With these considerable advantages, many feel RIBA should be an irrepressible force for positive change, and it’s the gap between that vast potential and the sometimes lacklustre reality which seeds rancour among its members.

However, in a recent speech at 66 Portland Place marking 100 days of his tenure as the new RIBA president, Simon Allford, kingpin of AHMM for three decades and among the best-connected designers in London, outlined a plan to mend the rift between architects and their institute.

Declaring it “must change”, Allford called for the RIBA to “become a generous host” – a shrewd manifesto which, if taken to heart by the institute’s top brass, could remake the organisation’s ethos and reputation.

Cultural production in architecture has been starved of cash for over a decade by government austerity and is poorly understood by the big British arts funders. Generosity should, as Allford insists, therefore be at the core of the well-heeled RIBA’s strategy. A new spirit of generous hosting would quickly pay dividends in the tidal wave of warmth and appreciation that would follow such a shift.

Britain is bustling with independent organisations creating memorable and impactful events

Pivoting from producing their own cultural programmes, to becoming “generous hosts” of others’ could transform the reach and efficacy of RIBA. Britain is bustling with independent organisations creating memorable and impactful events celebrating and interrogating architecture in adventurous ways often on miniscule budgets.

Rather than using its resources to compete with this community of buccaneering culture creators, what if the RIBA instead supported them with grants, space and promotion?

Why not make architecture.com, RIBA’s enviable flagship URL, a home for championing all events engaging audiences with architecture rather than just those run by RIBA staff?

Why not direct RIBA’s 350,000 Twitter and Instagram followers to the daily array of architectural exhibitions, talks and festivals staged by others, rather than only RIBA’s own?

Why not make the vast collection of photography and drawings in the institute’s archives freely available for non-profit publishing rather than charging hefty licence fees? By foregrounding and enabling the work of others, and generously opening up access to its assets, RIBA could contribute so much more to the world than by guardedly acting in isolation.

Imagine what all the small charities working on connecting ordinary people with big conversations about the urban landscape could achieve if, instead of burning half their energy hustling for scraps of funding from the Arts Council and sponsors, they could draw on core support from the RIBA coffers.

RIBA HQ isn’t perfect but its weakness is not its architecture

Yet instead of investing outwards, the RIBA is instead poised to pump £20 million into a “comprehensive refurbishment” of its own 1934 central London headquarters. The upgrade will certainly give 66 Portland Place shiny new facilities, but to what end? The George Grey Wornum-designed HQ isn’t perfect but its weakness is not its architecture, but rather who is (and who isn’t) able to use it.

The single biggest barrier to anyone instigating cultural programmes in Britain, especially London, is the cost of access to space. Attempt to book a theatre, gallery or crumbling warehouse for a simple talk, and you’ll likely be looking at a bill for thousands of pounds.

The RIBA itself currently charges around £10,000 including a minimum bar and canapes spend to host a 200 person lecture in its Florence Hall (and that’s with a charity discount!). This high cost of access stifles innovation, driving ticket prices up and creative culture makers far away from Marylebone.

66 Portland Place should be the village hall of the profession – a space for everyone with something to say about architecture to speak freely. Instead, posh wedding parties and corporate conference organisers are the only clients with pockets deep enough to get past the lobby.

RIBA should simply open the doors and let people in

If a more generous RIBA were to make decent spaces freely available to anyone working on architectural public programmes, they could catalyse a rapid renaissance in the vivacity and impact of the sector’s cultural life. Instead of investing £20 million in itself, building bigger, better, more competitive facilities to draw audiences away from programmes elsewhere, RIBA should simply open the doors and let people in.

Hosting the programmes of others needn’t mean RIBA producing less itself. Some of the institute’s most valuable work is its least visible – template policies and contracts, the stages of work, a pension scheme. These are the unsexy professional tools that help architects navigate the terrain of their trade every day.

Allford’s call for expanded generosity could include RIBA launching useful new services such as insurance. British practises currently endure exorbitant professional indemnity premiums from an insurance sector that doesn’t understand the industry and has no incentive to rein in prices.

Russell Curtis, a director at RCKa says insurance bills for many small practises are spiralling to as much as £100,000 a year meaning many firms are struggling to make ends meet.

Marco Goldschmied, a former RIBA president, has called on the institute to act by launching its own insurance scheme. Using its clout and contacts, RIBA could run an underwriting arm dedicated to supporting architects with better cover than the bad deals high street insurers offer.

Discount the premiums in line with annual RIBA fees and no one would question the value of chartered membership ever again. Alternatively, RIBA could, as Goldschmied argues, simply lead the process of signing up the 300 or so practises required to launch an architects’ mutual – using its unique position to instigate genuinely useful change without carrying the risk.

For me, the endless RIBA-bashing is cathartic pub banter but will ultimately not lead to real change. Allford is right to centre his presidency on making the institute more generous, but RIBA spending £20 million to upgrade Portland Place – an already remarkable building – feels like an expensive solution to the wrong problem.

The real solution to transforming RIBA’s cultural impact and winning over the hearts of sceptics is not owning an amazing space, but entrusting others with meaningful ownership of space.

Phineas Harper is director of Open City and formerly deputy director of the Architecture Foundation. He is author of the Architecture Sketchbook (2015) and People’s History of Woodcraft Folk (2016).

The post “RIBA upgrading Portland Place is an expensive solution to the wrong problem” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Showroom: Bolon has launched a woven flooring collection called Truly, which features hyper textures and “colour effects and patterns never seen”.

Truly was created by Bolon’s in-house design team and the brand considers it one of the bravest products it has produced.

“We’ve been braver than ever before,” said Bolon head of product management Klara Persson. “We gave ourselves the freedom to try out and create all that we have been curious about over the years, questioning technical challenges and our own perceptions to innovate new expressions, weaving flooring in colour effects and patterns never seen.”

The Truly collection includes Anything Everything, a matrix-like grid pattern in shades of intense green, and Disrupt and Discover, a check pattern in threads of white and gold.

There is also a zigzagging pattern called 100%, the soft-toned collage-like design named I See You, and the dark and shining effects of Prexis.

The styles in the Truly collection are available as a roll, as tiles measuring 50 by 50 centimetres, or as Bolon Studio tiles. All are made in Sweden with renewable energy and contain recycled material.

Product: Truly
Brand: Bolon
Contact: carmencita.lundsten@bolon.com

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