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.
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They’re more useful than you know. Try these nine moves.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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