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If you’re looking for the best information on creating your dream kitchen, bedroom or bathroom, look no further than Kitchens Bedrooms & Bathrooms magazine online.
We’ve selected our favourite features from Britain’s best-selling kitchen, bathroom and bedroom magazine, from wow-factor kitchen spaces, to sublime bathroom and bedroom sanctuaries. In fact, you'll discover all manner of expert planning advice for the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom as well as regular news of future designs bound for the home.
We also bring the latest and greatest home appliances to the fore, so whether you’re after a top-end professional oven for the kitchen, or the hottest designer showering system, KBB magazine online has got it covered. What’s more, we’ll bring you profiles of the industry’s best designers and their innovative designs that could take centre stage in your kitchen, bedroom and bathroom projects of tomorrow.
Of course, there’s much more in store in the latest issue of Kitchens, Bedrooms & Bathrooms magazine, which is on sale from December 2nd. But, in the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy our dedicated online service.
Jackie Daly, Editor
Understanding Urquiola
The freestanding 1800mm bathtub is made from moulded mineral with a resistant gel coated surface and features an integrated towel holder
KBB talks to Patricia Urquiola about her bathroom collection for Axor
To gauge the achievements of Patricia Urquiola is to know that her contemporaries include Philippe Starck, Marcel Wanders, Jean-Marie Massaud and Karim Rashid. It’s a man’s world and she is one of the few successful women in it.
“Vaguely familiar” was the reaction of friends when I told them about my impending interview. Indeed, Urquiola has not attained the household recognition of Starck – to be fair only a handful of names from the upper echelons of product design have tapped into consumer consciousness – but the elite companies clamouring to collaborate with her will ring a few bells: Kartell, B&B Italia, Flos, Driade; the list goes on.
The bathroom is unfamiliar territory for Urquiola – a rare thing for the Spanish-born designer who has turned her hand to most things in the field of design. To say her productivity is prolific is an understatement. Milan alone played host to her new Comback chair for Kartell, a fresh take on the classic Windsor design of the 18th century proposed in plastic; a collection of seating solutions for Moroso (her favourite is Silver Lake which pays homage to Californian modernism of the ’50s); and two new proposals for Molteni & C, including my favourite – the textile Night & Day bed.
The single-lever basin mixer is wall mounted with a spout of 217mm. Maximum temperatures can be set on installation and it features a QuickClean system for easy removal of limescale
Urquiola is no shrinking violet; she talks fast, says a lot and has strong opinions. She is equally warm, enthusiastic and expressive. More than two decades in Italy has not diluted her strong Spanish accent although her impulse is to speak Italian. ‘Capito’ she asks repeatedly. ‘Understand’?
She talks fondly of Philippe Grohe the manager of Axor, “He is very special, very open to new ideas.” And she’s particularly passionate about the strong bond she develops with the companies she works with. “The relationship you have with each of your friends is very different; it is something marvellous and unique. My relationship with a company is the same. My history with Philippe has nothing to do with my history with another company. It is a different person, a different conversation, another energy.”
Axor Urquiola overhead showerheads are available in 180mm diameter or 240mm diameter and feature AIR technology and a QuickClean system. The hand shower shown is the Axor hand shower with two spray modes and a QuickClean system
Axor Urquiola is one of the company’s most extensive and comprehensive bathroom collections to date. Four years in the making, it covers everything from fixtures, bathtubs and basins through to a radiator that can serve either as a freestanding room divider (a neat reminder of the trend towards open-plan bedroom-cum-bathrooms) or as a wall-mounted heating appliance.
Urquiola isn’t the sort of designer who grasps at trends for the sake of it. She dismisses large luxury baths as ‘stupid’ and insists that the best solution is one tub per person. “Sometimes I go to hotels and the bath is as big as a pool and I think to myself, ‘it’s too big, I’m not going to waste all that water’. It’s not very intelligent, capito?” Instead, Urquiola proposed a single tub for Axor, remarkable not because of its size but its slipper-inspired body made from a new material that allows Axor to create the graceful shape in a single cast.
This water-saving message washes its way throughout Urquiola’s collection. She draws my attention to the sleek basins, which feature slot-like handles. “They look like little buckets, no? They remind you that water is valuable, capito?” The handles also serve as convenient towel holders, again made possible by the flexibility of the new material.
The Axor Urquiola collection breaks down the boundaries between the bathroom and living area mixing together materials, scale, styles and even cultures. There are 22 individual products, plus a wide range of accessories and a modular radiator system
While Urquiola believes that the job of a designer is to nudge the boundaries of design (“we have to test the limits of the company we work with, our job is to move the marker”), this is not the raison d’etre of her collection. “The new aesthetic is rethinking,” she says of her inspiration. “Rethinking the way we produce things. Rethinking the way we use water. Rethinking not just innovating. Innovation was an aesthetic of the ’80s and ’90s and now, with all the problems in the world, yes we have to be innovative, but we also have to rethink.”
The September issue of KBB is on sale now or you can subscribe online here
