Caroma, Australia’s leading designer and supplier of bathroom and kitchen products, partnered with Evostyle on the design and development of the premium Elvire bathroom collection, which has since been awarded a Good Design Award.
Caroma wanted to create a truly bespoke product for its premium customers. Although it is outside Caroma's traditional design language, industrial designer Luke Di Michiel chose to incorporate timber. Every piece of timber is one-of-a-kind, so the material provided the beautifully bespoke premium touch that Di Michiel was looking for in the Elvire collection.
“The incorporated timber components became the hero of the collection,” says Di Michiel. “These beautiful touchpoints of the bathroom that people would come into contact with, and touch and turn. It was important to Caroma that those touchpoints were with timber because we loved the idea of connecting people with nature.”
The collection includes turned timber components, including timber handle mixers on the basin mixers, wall mixers and bath fillers, as well as the toilet flush buttons.
As bathroom manufacturer Di Michiel explains, designing with timber is outside Caroma’s traditional expertise, so they needed to engage an external supplier. “I was familiar with Evostyle through their work predominantly in the design industry with their beautiful furniture and their collaboration with Australian designers. They also seemed the perfect fit, because they’re Australian with state-of-the-art facilities and extensive product knowledge.”
Elvire is a big collection that took over two years to bring to the market. The timber components form part of a larger assembly with other components being developed concurrently by a different supplier. So, the key challenge was how to bring it all together.
When looking at timber options, Caroma was keen to embrace sustainable Australian timbers. It also wanted to provide consumers with a choice of the colour palette in the range. Working with Di Michiel and the team at Evostyle, it was able to embrace the beautiful look of a darker timber by using Tasmanian blackwood, as well as a lighter option with Tasmanian oak.
