Italian Designed Bathroom Sinks
17 June 2008
“Fallingwater”
I’m listening to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto as I write these lines, and it strikes me as a perfect accompaniment, because of his last three piano concertos, this was the most economical of line. What he would have said with four or five notes in the third and fifth concertos required only one in the fourth. A lot of Italian design is like that. They have a sparseness of line that may take some getting used to, for those of us, who, like me, are enamored of all things traditional. But, like the Beethoven Fourth, there is an astonishing richness in that minimalism.
Il Bagno Bandini is another Italian company, but you must not interpret that phrase as meaning “ho hum, more Italian companies,” because, in fact, I intend it to mean, “Here’s another Italian company about to blow the socks off everything we’ve come to expect from bathroom design.”
Il Bagno Bandini has a number of lines of bathroom fixtures, all of them innovative. The Arya line at the top of this blog is the type of fixture Frank Lloyd Wright may well have specified for his famous Fallingwater house, had it been available in 1935. It comes in two versions, both of which feature water falling down an innovative Corian faucet. One version has a sink, faucet, and vanity in an integrated whole. The other simplifies even more and has the faucet emptying into a clear bowl.
The other line that particularly caught my eye—because I’m a woodworker—is the Onda. It looks like plastic in the pictures, but it is actually bent-wood lamination, proof again that you can pretty much do anything with a felled tree! The other thing that is worth noting is that the lighter colored panels in the Onda line are, in fact, drawer fronts for some rather nicely fitted drawers.
Finally, if I can return to the Beethoven for a moment, most of his compositions were, when he wrote them, very much on the cutting edge, but we are still enjoying his music well over a century later, because new, if it is done well, does not mean transitory. For all the modernity of Il Bagno Bandini’s creations, there is a certain timelessness to them, and that is what you most want to achieve in design.
Joseph
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