At the Dornbracht Booth One Day Later

The morning that the doors opened on the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, Dornbracht display coordinator Bruce Jones has changed from jeans and a T-shirt to a dark suit.

Inside, the booth is a clean, uncluttered gray lined with the silver detailing of faucets and the serene, soundless scenes of Dornbracht bath culture looping on video against the wall. Outside the booth, huge backlit ad photographs emphasize lushness and water.

Passing architects praise the booth’s clean presentation and measured use of color. Their favorite new products are overwhelmingly the MEM shower, a vent which rains water onto the bather as if they were caught in a precisely aimed summer storm, and the ribbon-like MEM faucets, which are wonders of precision machining.

“Today’s my favorite day,” Jones beams. “These are the people whose education and profession validates their opinions. Today, no one has asked me, ‘How much is this?’”

Other favorites of passers-by, according to Jones, are the Meta.02 series and the Meta Plasma products. “People are receiving Meta Plasma as a new material even though it’s not,” says Jones. “They’ve seen it in clipboards but not as a design product.”

Though Dornbracht is a large company, its booth distinguishes it as a company allied with the arts. A vitrine inside the stand displays the last six years’ worth of Dornbracht annual statements—books that show how photographers, graphic designers, and other artists interpret “the culture of the bath” through their medium. The work is then gathered into a book that certainly belongs on coffee tables everywhere.