Master Bathroom, Private Client, Utrecht

A private master bathroom commission for a residence in Utrecht, designed to bring the restorative quality of a Japanese onsen into the rhythm of everyday life. The brief was to create a space that felt genuinely alive with natural materials, where the act of bathing could slow time rather than simply fill it.

Utrecht moves at its own pace. Quieter than Amsterdam, more grounded, with a relationship to its canals and streets that feels unhurried and deeply inhabited. This bathroom was designed with that same temperament. Not a room that announces itself, but one that settles around you the moment you enter.

The back wall is the room’s defining gesture. Vertically reeded pale oak slats run floor to ceiling in a single unbroken plane, their fine linear rhythm filling the entire wall behind the bath and continuing across the ceiling in a seamless wrap. The effect is extraordinary. Standing in this room, you feel enclosed by timber in the most generous sense of the word, as if the space itself has been crafted from a single living material. The shadows cast between each slat shift with the light throughout the day, making the wall feel subtly different in the morning than it does at dusk.

Against that wall, a freestanding bath in matte white stone resin sits in a pool of natural light from the tall window to the side. Its form is oval and unhurried, its surface utterly without gloss or pretension. Set into the slat wall directly behind it, two wall-mounted matte black controls sit perfectly centred, minimal and precise. Two dark circles on a pale linear ground, the kind of detail that reads as inevitable once you see it and impossible to imagine any other way.

The vanity runs along the adjacent wall in warm natural oak, its floating form keeping the floor plane open and the room feeling generous. Two deep vessel basins in matte dark clay brown sit on its surface, their rounded sculptural forms introducing a warmth and earthiness that offsets the crispness of the white bath beautifully. Wall-mounted matte black spouts extend from the plaster wall above them, and a large frameless mirror above reflects the room back with quiet clarity.

A tall ficus tree in a raw concrete planter stands between the bath and the vanity, its lush, deep green canopy reaching toward the ceiling. In a room of pale timber, white stone and dark clay, that generous living green is the element that makes everything breathe. It is not a decorative gesture. It is essential.

Beside the bath, a slatted teak bench carries a pair of folded linen towels in warm stone. The bench is a piece of restrained Nordic craftsmanship, its open timber surface echoing the reeded wall behind it and connecting the room’s material story in a final quiet note.