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Nov 05, 2024

We Now Live in a World Where Folding Bathtubs Exist - InsideHook

Two years ago, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch about portable, inflatable toilets. The punchline made sense: after all, there are some things that just aren’t meant to be portable. Toilets are

Two years ago, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch about portable, inflatable toilets. The punchline made sense: after all, there are some things that just aren’t meant to be portable. Toilets are one, and another familiar sight in bathrooms is also on that list: bathtubs. Or at least that’s been the status quo up until now. Things have changed, however, and now portable bathtubs are a thing — a least, that’s what an exhibit at this year’s Designart Tokyo demonstrates.The product being displayed is called Bathtope, and it’s the work of Japanese home design company Lixil. The accompanying video features lovingly-composed shots of textiles and gives a sense of the process behind the portable bathtub, which the company depicts nestled inside of a shower stall.

As the company explained on Designart Tokyo’s website, Lixil created Bathtope to celebrate the company’s first hundred years working with plumbing and bathroom products. “[T]he concept we derived is an ambiguous style that is neither a shower room nor a bathroom, and the idea came from the traditional Japanese concept of haretoke,” they wrote — in this case, creating a space that could function as both a standing shower and a bathtub.

As Dezeen’s Jane Englefield reports, Bathtope is designed to be rolled up and stored when it’s not being used as a bathtub. The textile used to make this space was also designed, Englefield notes, to use less water than a comparable traditional bathtub. It isn’t hard to see the appeal here: even if you enjoy a shower stall for its efficiency, you might crave a deeper clean every now and then. With this, you don’t necessarily have to choose between one and the other.

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