HOME SPAS
29 July 2008
“The Way of the Water”
Much of what follows will have to be taken with a grain of salt, but in looking at this concept (I’m fumbling for an adjective, but I don’t know if it should be called bathroom concept, spa concept, or holy smokes concept), what immediately came to mind was a Taoist concept I have followed most of m
y life, namely taking the way of the water. This is not the place—nor I the writer—for an explanation of such concepts, but there is something elemental about water that brought that concept to mind when I saw this room.
Water is tranquility, it is strength, it is purity, it is life itself, but we never really think such things when we use the bathroom, not even on those days when we decide to pamper ourselves with an hour-long bath. But now Dornbracht has come up with a room that lends itself to just such thoughts, and more than that, to an inner peace I don’t believe you could obtain in any other bathroom I have ever seen.
I know what you’re thinking. There is an openness here that is, well, really open! There are no walls on this shower, no shower door, which means… well, one thing it clearly means is that you will need a bathroom considerably larger than the closets we have in our home, but for those who are blessed (and I use that term deliberately) with an oversized bathroom, now’s your chance to think outside the box. As a matter of fact, you can dispense with the box (A.K.A. shower walls) altogether, something I could personally do without a twinge. I mean, really now, who’s going to miss cleaning the grout?
The enclosed shower is an old concept. Free yourself of it, and you open yourself to muc
h more than an enlarged bathroom; you make possible an entirely different way of life. Any well-designed bathroom is luxurious, but a sublime bathroom design makes of this essentially utilitarian room a retreat, not in the sense of giving up on life, but in the sense of withdrawing from the turmoil into a quiet place to refresh and rebuild. Our case in point is supplied by Dornbracht.
It is much more than a bathroom. It is, to paraphrase the Rod Serling introduction to his television series “The Twilight Zone”, a journey into another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. In a room like this one (I’ve still not thought of the proper name for it) you do not clean your body nearly so much as you—well, I was going to say clean your mind, but really, what you do in such a place is restore your mind and your spirit by enveloping them in a serenity quite unlike any other, and you do it by taking the way of the water. Dornbracht calls it an Elemental Spa, and I believe that it is.
Joseph
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