A design study for a bathhouse carved from a single warm material — vaulted red clay walls, three oculus skylights, and a carved stone tub set at the end of a quiet water channel.
Category
Bathhouse Interior
Status
Self-initiated Design Study
Scope
Spatial Direction · Interior Design · Materiality · FF&E
Creative direction and interior design — Nara Interiors
The study tests how far one material can go: tadelakt-finished clay covers every wall and ceiling, vaulted overhead and pierced by three round skylights that pull daylight down in soft columns.
A shallow water channel runs the length of the room, leading the eye toward a carved stone tub set beneath an arched niche. A leather bench and a reeded timber door are the only other materials allowed in.
The three skylights are graduated in size rather than repeated identically, so the column of light shifts in width and intensity through the day — a detail the study treats as the room's real ornament, in place of applied decoration.
The study proposes a single material carried floor to ceiling: tadelakt-finished clay in a deep red-brown, cool underfoot in honed travertine at the tub and channel. Leather and reeded oak are the only additions — a bench, a door — kept deliberately minimal against the vaulted clay surround, so nothing competes with the colour itself.
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