At the Interior Design Show: the latest in killer bathtubs and silly sinks

My wife asks, "Are you going to keep flogging this? Enough already!" But every year it just gets worse.

Every year, I collect my media pass for the Interior Design Show in Toronto and complain about what I see there; I don’t know why they keep inviting me. The tubs are a particular obsession of mine (see last year’s post, Stop the attack of the killer bathtubs!) Spouse Kelly says, “Really? Are you going to keep flogging this?” And the answer is yes.

The salesperson was particularly proud of this tub from Victoria + Albert, which has no overflow; the drain is designed to detect water pressure and pop open when the water reaches 17” deep. The walls keep getting thinner, and the bases keep getting smaller; four teensy brackets are screwed into the floor to keep this stable, but I can imagine someone sitting on the side and the whole thing tipping over.

My complaints, as always, are that these are impossible to get in and out of safely; you can’t sit on the edge and swing your legs over. There is nowhere to put grab bars. There’s nowhere to put anything. There are no ergonomics to the shape of it to make it comfortable; it is just designed to look pretty sitting in the bathroom.

I am not alone in worrying about this. After my 2020 killer bathtub rant, the Universal Design Project put a panel of experts together to discuss it, and got comments like “It’s hard to get out of the tub without slipping”, “Transfers in and out would be next to impossible”, “Not functional for wheelchair users without adaptive equipment”, “Does not seem very functional”, “Tubs will likely be situated far from walls and potential grab bars”,  “They have very thin sides”, “There’s a high step clearance”, “No handhold placements”, “It looks slippery”. The panelists concluded:

“So product designers, take note!  Please design with the abilities of all people in mind, not just those who are high functioning, because we know that functioning can easily change in an instant.”

If you put it against the wall, you get a whole new set of problems. How do you clean behind it? Why is there so much plumbing, with a separate control for the hand shower and for filling the tub?

Hmm, very thick walls. I couldn’t understand what was happening here and was told excitedly, “It’s an infinity tub!” You can fill it right to the top, and water overflows into the trough surrounding the tub. Unlike an infinity pool, the water goes straight to the drain, which seems extravagant, so I asked, how do you use it? Do you fill it right to the top and do the Archimedes thing, displacing your body volume in water? The salesperson looked at me strangely and suggested that one could get in and then fill it up to the top. Eureka!

Honestly, I often think that bathtubs have not improved much since Archimedes’ time. I look forward to when I hit IDS2042, and someone has finally designed a tub shaped like a lounge chair, with a wide deck around it and beautiful, integrated grab bars to help you get in and out, perhaps heated so you can warm your towels as you bathe. Safe, comfortable tubs that work for everyone of every age and are beautiful too. Is this so hard?

After my recent sink rant, I thought I would look more closely at this year’s offerings. Remember Alexander Kira’s comment that “Most conventional lavatories are unfunctional since they are still nothing more than the old-fashioned wash basin fitted up with a water supply and drain-” Kira would have laughed at how literal we are now with old-fashioned basins sitting on a washstand. I have never understood this design trend.

There were quite a few of these, which I don’t understand either. I get how double sinks might be an attraction if you don’t want to look at your partner’s dirt in the sink. But separate faucets on one giant sink?

This one has a nice slope to the drain under the weird separator between the two halves, but I still don’t get the point.

Finally, I fell into a tiny booth for distributor Cardinal Sales and discovered the Roca Horizon sink. It doesn’t have a stopper or even a visible drain. It is not a bowl, just a tilted slab. No pretence, just a place to put your hands under the tap.

Director of Specifications Timmone told me that Roca sinks are being designed to eliminate splashing for health reasons, as required by the Ontario Building Code next year. They will all have sloping bottoms angled away from the user and without stoppers. It seems that we might finally be getting sinks that work, that don’t spread bacteria and viruses all over the room, and that are easy to keep clean.

Things are changing in the kitchen, too; sinks are turning into “workstations.” There is a stainless steel ledge around the sink and piles of attachments that sit on them- baskets, cutting boards, drying racks; it seems like a good idea to put all the wet stuff in a giant basin like this.

Next: Tiny houses and ADUs.