Partners for life: Villeroy & Boch

Good design is faithful. It accompanies you throughout your life. When it comes to bathrooms, Villeroy & Boch places strong emphasis on ideas such as ‘whole’ and ‘holistic’. It does not think of hygiene and body care in terms of separate, individual products or different stages of life, but rather systematically and as a whole – whereby it is not necessary to separate different wishes and needs. For this reason, Villeroy & Boch’s comprehensive product portfolio for the bathroom ensures a broad range of solutions for planners and architects, including ones that speak to future requirements which bathroom users may sometimes not even have thought of at the time of planning.

From shower toilets, fittings and furniture, to pre-wall installation systems, it’s possible to tick almost anything off the list of bathroom needs from Villeroy & Boch’s portfolio. It doesn't matter in which phase of life that they will be used, the bathroom can be future-proofed right from the planning stage – even when planning is so far in advance that users may not ordinarily have started to think about changing needs or imagining what their future requirements might be.

Typically, most people do not go through more than two newly designed bathrooms at home, in one lifetime. With this in mind, Villeroy & Boch has cultivated a smart, holistic concept of the bathroom as a life companion. With their ViCare bathroom range, this concept is given the appropriate form, and with it, the most diverse situations, circumstances, sensitivities and needs fit into a single bathroom.

The design reaches out to people at certain points and in specific places. It’s a system that welcomes people in different phases of life, all of whom bring with them completely different needs in relation to hygiene and body care. Products from the ViCare series support people from the very beginning, with smart design decisions that serve comfort and aesthetic needs, but, above all, broadly different ones: the needs of the very young who are learning about the functions of the bathroom in the first place, to those of older people, whose lives are made more comfortable with them.

In the planning stage, reinforcement-panels in the wall are often considered, because the system may have to bear more at some point than it does at the time of its design, due to potentially different tasks and loads in the future. Like everything, the body changes over time, and with it, hygiene requirements, daily routines and usage habits – and a bathroom should not need to fundamentally change in order to support these natural developments.

With this future oriented system, connections to electricity and water, for example, are integrated into the concept from the very beginning, ready for use, but will perhaps only need to be activated later. On the other hand, handles, which are sometimes integrated into the ceramic of the washbasin may serve a more vital role for older users in the future, but in the meantime, can serve a practical function in the present as towel rails.

A shower holder that can be adjusted with one hand may become indispensable at some time in the future, but adds to convenience and comfort long before that. Simply by virtue of the way they are shaped, the rounded edges of bathroom furniture also gently guide hands and fingers. Lighting strips provide orientation by guiding the eyes and attention at once, but they also lend a discreet elegance to the room.

The products in the ViCare range together cover a spectrum that reflects a diversity of living circumstances and needs, in which different designs can be made more generous, deeper or wider than society and industry may otherwise define. The design of the ViCare bathroom range, its shapes and materials, supports, assists and anticipates – it extends a helping hand, while its aesthetics and discreet design lines don’t overtly communicate that any such help may be required.

This often quite literal helping hand offered to users by Villeroy & Boch’s bathroom solutions come not only via thoughtful and smart formal design decisions, but also through innovative technological developments: The ProActive+ system, for example, is an actuator panel that reacts to everything, almost as intuitively as people react to good design. The flush can be activated as the user wishes – either manually as usual with an integrated button, or completely touch-free with a gesture. If the user forgets to flush, ProActive+ doesn’t. The system also automatically knows how much water to use, depending on whether it is used for a short time, standing up or for longer – so not only good for the user, but the environment too.

© Architonic