Showroom PERTOT

This showroom is a small shop for bathrooms in the outskirts of Trieste, Italy. We were attracted to client's open-minded attitude towards selling strategies. They were looking for an alternative of the conventional bathroom shop where one can find hundreds of ready-made wannabe bathrooms.

The question was how to challenge the obvious and allow customers to play a substantial role in the showroom. We proposed a series of custom made steel mobile elements: trolleys for toilets, sinks, bath and tubs in order for customers to try out individual bathroom ideas in the scale of 1:1. The mobiles and all other furniture are custom-made out of special raw 4mm thick steel with exposed welding.

The showroom consists of the laboratory, entrance gallery and office space. The laboratory is organized in 3 stripes: parking (for mobiles), working (salesmen workspaces), testing (empty field as a graph paper for testing various bathroom proposals or to have temporary exhibition). Such an experiment allows the user to check or even change his dream bath arrangement before mounted on site. The entrance gallery serves as a lobby with 3D custom-made tile displays presenting various formats, structures and colors of Mosa tiles and a color-wall exhibiting the Mosa Colors. All cubes work as catalogue storage and the tall cubes act as counter either for discussing or serving drinks at events. Custom glass-wall delineates the managers’ office-space and service.

Such a laboratory showroom embeds the continuous spatial transformation and most of all integration of the user in the active 1:1 design process.

Since this is a renovation of a former storage we wrapped the laboratory with the neutral white curtain to unify the space, to control the amount of natural or artificial light and to improve acoustics. The curtain also hides what is usually the central part of any tile showroom – thousands of tile samples in meters and meters of slim drawers.

Materials: - raw 4mm thick steel - textile - tiles