There's a habit, in most homes, of treating the bathroom as the one room exempt from personality. Everything else gets curated — the sitting room, the hallway, even the kitchen — while the bathroom is left to function alone, tiled in white and left to get on with it.
It doesn't have to work that way. Designer Beata Heuman, whose approach I admire, works from the idea that every room in a house ought to earn its keep aesthetically, not just practically — the smallest spaces included. A bathroom can hold a mirror worth looking at twice, a chair with real design pedigree, a jug that's more sculpture than vessel.
This scheme takes that idea and runs with it. An Italian wood sunburst mirror from the 1970s anchors the room — gilt, radiating, unmissable. Beside it, a Selene chair by Vico Magistretti for Artemide: originally designed in the 1960s as one of the first chairs moulded from a single sheet of plastic, it's as much a piece of design history as it is somewhere to sit. A Murano glass filigree jug brings in the kind of fine, handworked detail that only comes from Italian glassblowing traditions — its white latticino threading catching the light differently through the day. Bamboo hooks, attributed to Franco Albini for Bonacina, do the practical work of the room without losing the thread of texture and warmth. And a handmade cushion, stitched from remnant fabric sourced in Sweden, ties the whole thing back to somewhere unexpected — proof that a scheme doesn't need to stay in one country, or one decade, to hang together.
None of this is about matching. It's about tension — gilt against plastic, Italian glass against Swedish cotton, mid-century design against something soft and handmade. That's where a room gets its character: not from consistency, but from contrast held with confidence.
