A BATH FROM THE PAST
When Tony O’donnell discovered an old bath in his Kent kitchen, he realised there was a demand for Victorian tubs – and decided to plug the gap
Tapping into the trend for Victorian-style tubs
Catchpole & Rye’s traditional cast-iron baths are found in some very swanky spots: beautiful period home renovations, architect-designed apartments, ultra-chic hotels… There’s even one installed on a platform overlooking a savanna in Kenya. But the Victorian bath that inspired this successful business was somewhere more humdrum. “We found it in the kitchen,” explains Catchpole & Rye’s Tony O’donnell, founder of the heritage bathroom business. “It had a plank of wood on top that was being used as a draining board and a bowl on top of that for the sink.”
Tony and his wife Elaine made the discovery when they were renovating their cottage in Kent back in 1990. Tony used to work in engineering and neither knew much about plumbing or antiques, so they had no idea what to do with this old claw-foot tub. “We tried to find someone to do the restoration work, but there wasn’t anyone. No one had been producing baths like this for at least 80 years,” Elaine says. “So Tony decided to do it himself.”
TAPPING INTO THE FUTURE
It was the early Nineties and the architectural-salvage market was taking off as people looked to reinstate original fittings stripped out of homes in previous decades. But while the growing demand for reclaimed bricks, stripped-pine doors and Victorian fireplaces was being met, finding restored furniture for bathrooms was a
different matter. “A small amount of damage won’t prevent an old fireplace from being used, but that’s not the case for baths and sinks; there’s a requirement for them to function properly. Taps and plumbing need to fit with up-to-date pipework, but the skills of this industry had largely been lost,” Tony explains.
Initially, Catchpole & Rye offered a restoration service, renovating antique baths and fitting them with modern mechanisms that suited their vintage look. Tony started exploring salvage yards, picking up old taps, basins and cisterns to study how Victorian bathrooms and plumbing worked. As cast-iron baths were no longer in production, he visited local metal foundries to understand the principles of their original manufacture. “We forget that in the early part of the Victorian period, people were using a bucket. Plumbing was this huge innovation. At the Great Exhibition in 1851, one of the landmark inventions unveiled was George Jennings’s flushing toilets and hundreds of thousands of people ‘spent a penny’ to use them,” Tony says. The box of old French taps under his desk and antique basins lining his office hint at an ongoing fascination: “I wanted to know how and why these things were made. What was the motivation for their design and what was the designer trying to achieve?”
HOT STUFF
It was a particularly fine example of Victorian design that led to the next stage of the business, when Tony realised a bath that he’d restored was so popular he could have sold it ten times over: “I’d been using local foundries to take casts of broken claw feet, but it occurred to me that we could take a cast of a whole bath. I could use the most interesting baths as patterns to make as many as we wanted.” The transition from restoration to manufacturing was “incremental” – by 2000, there was a 50:50 split between sales of each, but today the cast-iron baths in Catchpole & Rye’s London and Kent showrooms are all newly made using antique patterns.
The process is much the same as it would have been 150 years ago. The company uses a traditional foundry in Kent (“There used to be one in every town, but many have closed down as production has moved abroad”), where molten metal is poured into hard sand moulds. “It’s not a complicated process – it’s the same theory Iron-age man used to make arrow heads – but it takes skill. Metal is poured into runners leading into the mould, which has breathers to allow air to escape or it will explode. This stuff is 1,400°C, but the way these guys are so relaxed around it, you’d think it was a cup of tea!” Tony says. Once cooled, the foundry team ‘strike the pattern’, which breaks up the mould and releases the rough cast
“Molten metal is 1,400°C, but the way these guys are so relaxed around it, you’d think it was a cup of tea!”
of the bath. It’s then transported to Catchpole & Rye’s workshop on an old dairy farm in the Kent village of Pluckley. When Tony started, he did all the finishing himself, but there’s now a team of 20 across several workshops on site.
The first stop for the cast-iron baths is the polishing workshop. “There’s not much I haven’t polished,” says Ian Cox, who started his apprenticeship 42 years ago at the age of 15 and has worked on everything from Aston Martins to bicycle parts. “The baths are rough when they come to me, so I have to fettle away the moulding sand and grind the coarse finish before I can start to polish it smooth. It’s hard work – they’re heavy beasts – but I like to think of the customer’s face when they see the mirror-smooth finish.”
The polishing process takes around a week for each bath – and that’s just the outside. The inside needs to be enamelled, then the whole bath lacquered, while fittings such as taps and wastes (the plumbing that gives water somewhere to go) are machined from lumps of brass and then electroplated to achieve the desired metallic finish (brushed brass is currently the most popular). “A bath can take four weeks, and we’re in charge of every part of the process,” says Jack O’donnell, Tony’s son, who oversees production in the workshops. “We take a piece of raw metal and turn it into something beautiful and functional that will stand the test of time.”
BESPOKE BATHS
Manufacturing in small quantities on their Kent site also means the company can tailor products to a customer’s request. That can range from bespoke electroplated taps to match the shade of an antique brass lantern to covering a bath in Swarovski crystals. “That was one of our more unusual requests,” Tony says. “But a big part of our business is customising baths and cisterns with the name of a family, house or hotel. Because we’re making each piece, it’s not hard for us to put a customer’s name on it instead of ours.”
While Tony still likes to keep his hand in at the workshop, most of his time is now taken up with design and innovation. Where other bathroom businesses are often led by predictions of future trends, he looks to the past. “Our bestselling Vingt-neuf bath, for example, is based on an old French design. English baths of the time were designed by men, for men. They were narrow, uncomfortable and had taps at one end, whereas this French design was double ended with taps in the middle. Its symmetry means it’s much easier to place in a room – and two people can get in!” he explains. “The original creators of these pieces were much more skilled than I am, so I look at how they can inform what we do and how we live now. I go to sleep every night designing these things in my head.” So his thinking time is not in the bath then? “No,” he laughs, “just looking at a bath is my thinking time!”
“From start to finish, a bath can take four weeks, and we’re in charge of every part of that process”