Bathrooms designed by the star architect
Before her untimely death in March, ‘starchitect’ Zaha Hadid designed a futuristic bathroom collection. Charlotte Lytton reports
Fluid lines, curves in all the right places: the look is signature Dame Zaha Hadid, yet the setting is not an Olympic stadium, skyscraper or opera house, but the destination atop everyone’s list in the morning: the bathroom.
It was the first such collection to be designed by the acclaimed architect, and one of the last projects she completed before her sudden death in March at the age of 65.
“It’s difficult for us to see and celebrate the Vitae suite without her here,” explains Maha Kutay, director of Zaha Hadid Design, which was established in 2007. “But at the same time, it has become a way for us to recognise her work.”
The nine-piece suite, produced in collaboration with luxury porcelain outfit Porcelanosa, seeks to recreate the dynamism of water. “The inspiration came from looking at sea shells. They have long fascinated us morphologically; how they work so well in water and how water flows through them,” Dame Zaha said in a previously unreleased discussion about the collection earlier this year. The range begins at £3,000 for the taps – a full price list will be announced on August 15, ahead of its release in September.
Featuring sweeping sinks, wallmounted toilets and a bowl-like tub, the pieces are characteristic of the sensual, futuristic style the Baghdadborn architect became known for. Closer inspection reveals further dashes of functionality: the porcelain bridge between the toilet and bidet serves as a towel rack and shelf, while the inner curves of the sink double up as soap dishes.
The idea to venture into bathrooms came when Hadid’s team designed a floor at Madrid’s Hotel Puerta América, and realised that by creating their own bespoke interior pieces they could enjoy full control over the space. It meant that Hadid’s long-time emphasis on the importance of cohesion could be realised. “She always wanted to go towards that part of design; how to incorporate lighting into architecture, and create fittings that aren’t just applied onto surfaces,” says Kutay. An opportunity proposed by Porcelanosa saw the collection get under way in 2013. The collaboration was borne from “a mutual wish to experiment with the idea of reinvigorating the design of bathroom objects,” Hadid had said. She had been particularly fond of the basins, which are orientated to the left or right. Though Hadid’s death from a heart attack left her 400 colleagues reeling, the 37 designs she was working on – from a mathematics gallery at London’s Science Museum to a metro station in Riyadh – will still bear fruit. A silver jewellery collection created with Danish design house Georg Jensen was revealed just two weeks before her death; the reception it received at Baselworld’s watch and jewellery show in Switzerland had made her “proud and happy”, Kutay says. Another cherished project, an exhibition on the life of artist Kurt Schwitters in Zurich, was finished by her team and unveiled to the public last month. From homeware to hotels, other creations with the hallmark Hadid design, but no longer her input, will include a theatre in Rabat, a Beijing airport and a plaza in Nicosia.
The Vitae bathroom collection serves as a distinct element of her expansive legacy. In spite of its rather darkly ironic name, it marks a 44year career that began with a degree at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972, when Hadid was 22.
Hadid, who later became a naturalised UK citizen, set up Zaha Hadid Architects in the capital in 1980 – it is now the country’s fastestgrowing architectural firm.
“It was Zaha’s triumph to go beyond the beautiful graphic visions of her sculptural approach to architecture into reality,” Lord Norman Foster, head architect of the Gherkin skyscraper in London, said. “She was an individual of great courage, conviction and tenacity. It is rare to find these qualities tied to a free creative spirit.”
Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004, and achieved the same feat upon being awarded the Riba Royal Gold Medal last year. She received a damehood in 2012 following her work on the Aquatics Centre for London’s Olympic Games, a decade after being made Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her buildings spanned a remarkable range, from the Maxxi art museum in Rome, to a car factory for BMW in Leipzig to a secondary school in Brixton.
“She was an extraordinary role
model for women. She was fearless and a trailblazer – her work was brave and radical,” said Amanda Levete, a fellow Stirling Prizewinning architect, following Hadid’s death. Hadid had long been a vocal defender of feminism, and struggled with the persistent refrain that she was a ‘diva’ throughout her career. “Would they still call me a diva if I was a man?” she mused in a 2013 interview with CNN.
A matter subject to less negativity was Hadid’s creations, which saw her dubbed ‘‘architecture’s biggest female superstar’’. Vitae was a new spin on this, exploring her penchant for unchartered territories by broaching bathrooms for the first time. She hoped that the collection would bring them to the fore of athome aestheticism, explaining that “the idea of beauty and hygiene are very closely interlinked in classical terms. We wanted to re-encounter those notions in the design of these bathroom objects.”
While the kitchen remains the architectural axis of the home, Kutay suggests that the suite’s design could later be broadened into a boudoir collection – a hint at what Hadid had in the pipeline, and her desire to “bring to the market something both useful and beautiful”.
Zaha Hadid Design’s first luxury homeware range launched at Harrods in 2014, offering bone china cups from £38 (and a transparent serving platter based on the Aquatics Centre for £9,999); Kutay believes that Vitae will help consumers to add an architectural flourish to their home at a snip of the price.
“That’s what Zaha wanted to get to,” she says. “We didn’t just want to create limited edition pieces that 1 per cent of the population could acquire – the idea was to make something that people could have in their homes and enjoy, to feel that they are a part of that design world.”
With an interior collection every inch as sleek and architectural as her outdoor fare, Vitae is surely a fitting legacy for the Queen of the Curve.