Axor, the designer brand of Hansgrohe, focuses on re-imagining the bathroom as a living space. Working with international studios, they seek to find alternative visions for this area of the home, considering it a place in which creative developments can also be explored. Having previously partnered with Patricia Urquiola, the Bouroullec Brothers and Jean-Marie Massaud, to name a few, the German company extends its collaboration with the release of ‘Axor Waterdream’ by Nendo.

Oki Sato envisions the shower also as a lamp, physically taking on the archetypal form one, as well as functionally emitting light. ‘My aim was to combine what is most archetypal about the living space, the lighting, with water, so as to give the shower an enhanced sensuous dimension in a way we have not yet seen before. The result is something that is not just a shower, nor just lamp, but a hybrid – a magic trick with light and water that is available day after day,’ says Oki Sato.

‘The natural coming-together of light and water is freed from spatial constraints: what traditionally took place in separate rooms – reading under a lamp in the living room, taking a shower in the bathroom – can now be experienced from from spatial allocations or confinements,’ comments Philippe Grohe, head of the Axor brand on the Japanese designer’s product.

‘I was thinking about water and light – that water does not exist without light, imagining a river or a lake: when it is night time it disappears in the darkness because it absorbs all the light. But at daytime you have the sunlight and then it creates all this glittering effect on the surface of the water. It creates depth, it creates colors and it becomes an emotional aspect. So I tried to create an object that combines light and water together in one piece.’ Oki Sato of Nendo

http://www.designboom.com/design/axor-waterdream-by-nendo-re-thinking-the-shower/