BATHROOM DESIGN
23 September 2008
“With a Song in my Tub”
I’ve written so much about contemporary design that I thought it might be fun to do a blog on the more traditional bathroom designs, but naturally, in so doing, I cannot bring myself to just write about the average bathroom, because we already have one of those, right? And, really, if all you are going to do for your own bathroom is pretty much what you already have—new shower and sink vanity, but essentially the same design—well, as I say, if
that is all you are going to do, there really is no need for you to be surfing the Internet in search of bathroom design ideas. But since you are here and I am here, perhaps we can discuss this a bit further. So, even though I am going to talk a bit about traditional design, I would like, to the extent that it is possible to push the envelope a bit.
What first caught my eye about MTI Whirlpools is the shower enclosure at left, but the more I looked around their website, the more I found things that just fascinated me no end, and it finally got to a point where I found myself very much disagreeing with the wisdom that states, “there is nothing new under the sun.” OK, maybe that’s true for politics—please don’t get me started on that!—but it certainly is not true in the areas of design, and especially not bathroom design. It’s just a sink, a toilet, and a shower, right? Wrong, actually, totally wrong. The truth is that those three items are just the beginning. There must be about a million ways to design and implement those three items, and every day, it seems, someone comes up with something else.
In some earlier blogs I discussed a fairly new system of lighting showers—both the water and the ambient air—in various colors. It’s a method called Chromotherapy, and it is billed as a process whereby one uses color and light to balance whatever energy a person’s body may be lacking, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental. With that as background, then, we can go on to discuss Audiotherapy.
If light can be therapeutic, why not music? Especially, why not music, because it is, after all
, what soothes the savage beast. Most of us listen to music every day to help us through various things. Myself, I never work on these blogs without classical music, and it is part and parcel of every woodworking project I’ve ever worked on. So, I do not deny the benefits of music, but MTI Whirlpools has taken it in a different direction with their acoustic transducers.
Their acoustic transducer system is applied to the bath shell’s exterior surface near the waterline and integrated into the tub structure, which results in the entire bath shell becoming a sounding board, and this, in turn, surrounds the bather with whatever sounds one prefers. Myself, I’m thinking Bach, but that’s just me. They call their process “Stereo H2O™,” but I’m thinking “Music Yowzer,” might have been more descriptive of the concept. My wife and I sometimes listen to music while we’re soaking in the outside spa, which is an undeniably serene thing to do at times, but the thought of having music actually pulsate through the water is, well, yowzer!
Regardless of whether it is indoors or out (but given the choice I would have it indoors), I can tell you that nothing really improves one’s home like a spa. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only thing better than a spa is having someone to share it with!
Joseph
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One Response to “BATHROOM DESIGN”
November 23rd, 2008 at 3:16 PM
Interesting article!
Regards,
gisel