Pink, blue, yellow… Coloured bathroom suites are pushing the all-white sets out of fashion
To walk into the Brokenbog warehouse is to walk into a flushable rainbow. Grand porcelain towers of 50,000 toilets, basins and bathtubs are stacked in a Pantone-esque pattern of pinks, greens and blues. To be specific: Flamingo, Melba, Romany, Heather, Pampas, Silver Fox, Sorrento Blue and more, a hundred more, each shade insistently nostalgic in its own specific way.
“When my parents bought a former Corporation house in Stevenage New Town in the 1970s,” says Deborah Sugg Ryan, professor of design history at the University of Portsmouth, “the first thing they did was to rip out the white bathroom and replace it with an aspirational avocado green suite with matching rippled tiles.” A decade later, across Britain the opposite was happening. Ccolour was bleached from bathrooms again, avocado suites making way for minimal white sanctuaries. The popularity ofminimalism in of the 1990s led to spa-like bathrooms, their function as much a place of “wellness” as cleanliness. White metro tiles suggested an industrial space, hygienic and pure, and pleasingly modern. Sugg Ryan charts the rise and fall of the coloured bathroom from 1932, when “speculatively built houses became more affordable and the coloured bathroom suite was a mark of individuality and modernity”. Art Deco geometric styles with black borders led to pastels, “like mint and pink, which were popular into the 1950s when vanity basins became fashionable. Pastels gave way to more muted tones, like beige and the notorious avocado green in the 1970s. The coloured bathroom suite fell out of favour in the 1980s when there was a fad for Victoriana and the return of the freestanding roll-top bath. Until recently, white reigned supreme, combined with built-in storage and beige or grey tiles.” Recently, Sugg Ryan bought a pink sink on impulse, and is very pleased with it.
