(Pre-)View at Bathrooms of the Year 2020, part 3:
Luxury Ascetics – Reverting to the Elementary
What is it that determines architecture and bathroom design in the year 2020? GROHE dealt with this question in a scientific way and developed a range of scenarios. With orientation at different target groups, corresponding concepts were developed. A special focus lay on the so-called „Best Agers“, the „Business Nomads“ and the „Luxury Ascetics“.
In the year 2020, the reverting to the elementary is the predominant principle for the luxury ascetics. A wasteful display of shapes, colours and decoration elements in their view is, if anything, a short-term fashion phenomenon – pompous furnishing and the display of material abundance do not meet their taste. Life in a country idyll is considered particularly desirable in 2020. Distractions, however, are undesirable. Life itself is exciting enough, that is the basic attitude. Hence the rather austere concrete walls, deliberately not hidden behind plaster and wallpaper or even the multi-media mood walls common in many places.
Alternative sources of energy and the economic use of water have become second nature. The hydrogen-driven car is an investment as indispensable as the water-recycling system in the basement or the steam shower in the spacious bathroom. This room, on the one hand, is equipped with intelligent technology, on the other hand, it creates the impression of a purist “water temple“. Clear and simple geometry dominates the structure of shapes. Material and surface are, above all else, authentic. Colours are extremely discreet accents and subordinate to the minimalist architecture.
The bathroom as well serves self-realization and the search for the balance of body, mind and soul. Therefore, it is at the same time a living-room the luxury ascetic spends a lot of time in. Water has been rediscovered as a healing, cleaning and relaxing natural element and has moved into the centre. It comes to the fore prominently, for instance in the form of a massive water pillar. This natural waterfall takes the archaic experience into the domestic living world.
