designer | interview 52 pg
“There is a very fine line between what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ when designing a suite or a bath”
DESIGNER K&B: Tell us about the new Acrymite baths? CUTCHIE: We wanted to make a range of good quality acrylic baths which would stand up to scrutiny. A lot of freestanding baths have a gel-coat outer which is very thin and cannot be mended if damaged. We have used drawn acrylic outer panels made in the same material as the inner, so you can take scratches out. It allows us to enter the market at a more competitive, different price level to that of our solid surface Cian Thinn baths which have been a great success over the last seven years.
DESIGNER K&B: How have consumer tastes and expectations changed during the time you have been working in the industry? CUTCHIE: What a change we have seen over these years! When we started, Avocado coloured bathroom suites had brought colour into the bathroom for the first time with plastic, creaking gel coated baths tubs. The growth of Acrylic sheet as a medium to make baths gave some credibility and trust back to the cheaper end.
We brought traditional to the mass market while Ideal Standard and Armitage continued their dominance of the trade sanitaryware business. The showrooms became less insular in what they looked at to buy and sell and started buying from Europe to show more contemporary designs. Fantastic contributions on quality, reliability and style came from Villeroy and Boch, Hansgrohe and Grohe and this made the buying public start to insist on hardware which would perform and last. It showed us all that they were willing
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to pay for quality and service. Everyone made decent money out of it. Contemporary is now riding high but there is still a lot of classical-ware sold for the nostalgic market.
DESIGNER K&B: What are the good and bad things about the changes that have taken place in the bathroom industry over the last 30 years or so? CUTCHIE: We have dipped our toes in the electrical side of things over the years with our lighting, switches, mirrors and cabinets. Unfortunately, the electrical industry has a terrible habit of having good ideas which sell at a decent price for a few months, then everybody does ‘their version’ of it, the price then plummets and nobody makes any money out of it.
The bathroom industry is in danger of falling into the same nasty habit. The saving grace is that good quality sanitaryware is very hard and very expensive to make. The cheap ceramic from the Far East does not stand up to scrutiny on glaze quality and pinholes when compared to the good manufacturers such as V&B and Imperial Bathroom Company.
However, a lot of consumers are happy that it looks OK and doesn’t leak – to be fair, they are probably not into bathrooms like we are! Showrooms need profits to be able to maintain their showrooms but customers have no embarrassment when demanding big discounts and are willing to buy cheap from the Internet companies, sometimes when the showrooms have done all the work in helping them choose the right products for their schemes.
The Shui bath from BC Designs’ Thinn range
It is hard to stop this, and hands up, I don’t know what the solution is to the problem, apart from having offerings which you do not allow to be sold by Internet companies. But then what do you do when a great showroom has an excellent and pro-active website? Training your sales staff to close the deal when the customers are face to face is an obvious method but information is always at hand on the nearest smartphone.
DESIGNER K&B: What has been your toughest design challenge? CUTCHIE: Coming up with the ‘next thing’ after the BC Sanitan Victorian Suite as it was such a memorable change to the styles which were on offer at that time. We had sold BC Sanitan in 1986 and I was offered a basin and pedestal which had something about it which could be as good. I changed it to make it ‘right’ and the Imperial Oxford Suite was born. I later came up with the Imperial Astoria Deco Suite which still sells in big quantities.
There is a very fine line between what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ when designing a suite or a bath - or anything really. You just know, and that is probably why we do it. I always think that when the prospective customer goes into a showroom where you have one of your products on display, you are competing with everything else in there. They will slowly walk through the aisles and you get about 2-3 seconds to stop them in their tracks as they pass your products. My objective is to halt them and make them walk over to our offering for a longer look, hopefully because we make it ‘right’.
BC Designs |
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