Keeping It Real United Products
We don’t often get to talk about bathrooms in Indesign, but they’re really the essential of any interior project. And let’s all agree, we can get a bit ‘judge-y’ about bathrooms – they can be the make-or-break of a beautifully resolved fit-out.
When Stephen Royce set up United Products, it was with a clear view to maintaining independence and creativity integrity.
Too often Royce would find his bathroom designs rationalised into obsolescence by hard-nosed marketers and their product development teams.
In founding United Products, Royce was conscious of following his own path. Collaborating with designer Thomas Coward for the brand’s first collection, the two drew from “loads of sketches” sitting in their notepads. Royce was keen to not limit the brand’s portfolio to just his and Coward’s work. If anything United Products acts as a banner for a cooperative of designers (including Nick Rennie, and The Stella Collective’s Hana Hakim), to contribute bathroom and wet area products to the collections. “I’ve been doing bathrooms and wet area products since I started at university,” says Coward, who designed the Contour Basin and Eve Bath (above) for United Products. “I studied furniture and product design in the United Kingdom but even then I was interested in doing standard furniture – there’s just so much out there. If everyone is designing a chair – and everyone was – then I was going to do wet area products. No one else was doing it and I found that when you’re in a small niche, you’re in your own lane. You’re incomparable.”
United Products services like-minded architects and designers with high-volume project needs. Royce feels their clientele “detects” the company’s youthful and fresh design-led vision – it’s something not always present in the bathroom sphere where collections can pay lip-service to marketing priorities and the bottom line.
“We produce to order on short lead times with our basins made overseas and all joinery and metalwork made in Australia,” says Royce. A simple and all-inclusive vision that is already gaining traction in the local market.