Creating bathroom art with Laufen

‘Functionality and poetry are not a contradiction,’ says Milan-based Toan Nguyen, designer of the beautifully balanced bathroom collection LUA for Laufen.

By LAUFEN BATHROOMS, Toan Nguyen, and Nick Compton for

LAUFEN BATHROOMS

January 9, 2023 | 11:00 pm CUT

Casa Albero, a playful but rigorous experiment in domestic geometry, provides the perfect backdrop for Laufen's new LUA range. Photo: Oliver Helbig

The bathroom is the most architectural of spaces suggests the French, Milan-based designer Toan Nguyen. A box, large or small, in which various fluid forms can interact, communicate and cohere. As he says, ‘Functionality and poetry are not a contradiction’ and in the bathroom, a place associated with a definitive range of functions, form and the relationships between forms can achieve a poetic force.

Of course, the bathroom is not merely a functional space. It is a place of ritual, of time with water, of elemental connection. It is often an intimate, almost sacred space of peace and contemplation.

When Swiss bathroom specialist Laufen set upon creating a comprehensive collection that brought together that rigorous functional poetry and allowed for all manner of ritual bathing behaviour, Nguyen was a natural choice. The result of that collaboration is LUA. ‘Bathing is part of our life and LUA represented a challenge to create a collection that is very simple and at the same time extremely complete in each of its parts: from the ceramics to the furnishings, from the bathtubs to the taps,’ says the designer.

LUA's designer, Toan Nguyen, was fixed on creating a comprehensive and cohesive bathroom collection with simple shapes that created a kind of formal conversation. Photo: Mattia Balsamini

The designer was intent on creating a collection fundamentally at ease with itself. ‘One of the main difficulties of LUA was not to design one object but to design a complete range, everything was really balanced,’ says Nguyen who has been working with Laufen for over a decade. ‘There was no product that was over-designed, nothing over-sized, it was important that every product was as simple as possible – functional but at the same time, very well proportioned and completely connected to the rest of the collection.’

The designer was intent on creating a collection fundamentally at ease with itself

All the pieces in the LUA collection are based around the form of an oval, with slightly flexed extremities. It's a geometry that seems plucked from nature but took painstaking sketching and modelling to get right. ‘When you are designing, sometimes there is a tendency to exaggerate, to generate a sign, to make the product different,’ Nguyen says, ‘I wanted to create a form that is like a part of our collective memory.’

Washbasins in the LUA collection are generous, user-friendly but always elegant and understated. Photos: Oliver Helbig

These are also forms that are a pleasure to use and work exactly as required. The washbasins in the collections feature large basins and spacious countertops and are available in a range of sizes and in a double bowl format. Drill holes allow for the easy addition of towel rails. Wall-hung washbasins feature oval fronts that mirror the shape of the bowl while a 'slim' rectangular washbasin, available in three sizes, comes complete with a vanity unit.

These are also forms that are a pleasure to use and work exactly as required

The collection also includes one-free standing, one wall-mounted and five built-in bathtubsLaufen’s high-tech Marbond material. And while just a space-saving 1.7 metres in length, ergonomic depressions at each end mean they are perfect for face-to-face bathing while their anti-slip material makes them super-safe for showering.

The bathroom is the most architectural of spaces asserts Nguyen. LUA works with its contextual architecture as well as expressing its own architectural power. Photos: Oliver Helbig

Nguyen has also created a unique collection of slim, minimal faucets that perfectly complement the range’s washbasins, bidets, bathtubs and showers. They are also fitted with Laufen’s Eco+ cartridge which means that warm water is only added to the mix when the lever is turned to the left.

Nguyen has also created a perfectly functional furniture set, LANI, to complement LUA. Soft-close doors and drawers as well as glass shelves inside the cupboards come as standard and the collection is available in a wild oak wood finish, white, grey, and over 40 other shades.

Though seemingly simple, establishing Lua's formal language took painstaking sketching and modelling. Photos: Mattia Balsamini

Matching purity of form with accessibility, LUA is the epitome of contemporary modern. As Nguyen says, the collection offers the perfect component, compositional parts to the skilled architect.

And when it came to shooting the new collection, Laufen knew they had to find a location that perfectly showcased these qualities. They found it in Casa Albero, the remarkable 1960s house set in the pine groves of Fregene, a seaside resort near Rome that was once the playground of Fellini, Pasolini and Mastroianni. Designed by a family of Italian architects, Giuseppe Perugini, his wife Uga de Plaisant and their son Raynaldo Perugini, the building is an experiment in organic brutalism but most fundamentally, a perfectly balanced arrangement of spheres, boxes and straight lines. Just like LUA, it is a collection of forms that rhyme and resonate and become a kind of poetry.

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