Revolutionary bathroom concepts: Werner Aisslinger designs for KALDEWEI

Ahlen, March 2017. – KALDEWEI’s longstanding collaboration with respected design firms such as Sottsass Associati and design greats such as Arik Levy and Anke Salomon is a fixture of product development. The company’s new partnership with designers Werner Aisslinger and Tina Bunyaprasit is now injecting fresh momentum into the innovation process. The design story revolves around the reinterpretation of bathtub and washbasin as sculptural yet functional structures in a given space. With its revolutionary “GRID” and “TRICOLORE” concepts KALDEWEI presents the consummate design of filigree, weightless bathroom objects made of steel enamel.

For KALDEWEI and Aisslinger, launching this partnership means striking out on new paths. Pure, fine-edged bathtubs and washbasins are interpreted in an innovative way in the given space: imaginative, exquisite and functional. To achieve this Werner Aisslinger and Tina Bunyaprasit have consciously played with multiple colours and striking framework structures in their design concepts. The design and functionality of the products also exemplify the growing convergence of bathroom objects and furniture.

GRID concept: open framework structure makes bathroom objects float
The hallmark of the GRID concept devised by Werner Aisslinger and Tina Bunyaprasit is the way surfaces and volumes are dissolved in favour of an open framework structure. The bathroom objects – made with a single layer of steel enamel and thus with a weightless look – appear to float in the room. With this concept the grid structure contains not only the bathtub and washbasin but can also – collage-style – integrate handy baskets for accessories and beauty products and, following the “urban jungle” idea, with decorative planters.

TRICOLORE concept: revolutionary play of colour contained by a steel band
TRICOLORE plays on not one but two new themes: on the one hand, the mainly monochrome white bathroom is revolutionised through the exciting use of multiple colours. On the other, the concept translates the historic archetype of freestanding lion claw bathtub into a completely new and modern design language. Think collage: the bathtub is enamelled in two colours. The third colour is brought in by the support structure with a wraparound steel band which seems to have been cut out of another bathtub.

Why bathrooms?
Werner Aisslinger explains his new love of bathroom objects as follows: “In future bathrooms will be the only places in the home where daily rituals are more important than the omnipresent digital world. For designers that means creating an oasis of wellbeing that is also more colourful, material-oriented and ever more unconventional and imaginative.” With the two design studies, GRID and TRICOLORE, he wants to join with KALDEWEI in taking another step forward and injecting fresh and creative – and perhaps even revolutionary – momentum into the industry.

About Werner Aisslinger
Werner Aisslinger is an internationally renowned and multi award-winning product designer with studios in Berlin and Singapore. His famous “July Chair” was inducted into the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. His design firm’s works are currently filling the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich with futuristic living worlds. These include a KALDEWEI bathtub. Aisslinger already partnered with the premium manufacturer in 2014 on the 25hours Bikini Berlin hotel project for which, as the lead designer, he furnished the hotel bathrooms with innovative product solutions made of KALDEWEI steel enamel.

Source: Franz KALDEWEI GmbH & Co. KG. Copy requested.