Hansgrohe's Vision of the Bathroom of the Future: Beyond Water.

Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking the bathroom means bringing this place into harmony with people and nature. Hansgrohe wants to create a cocoon for resource-saving regeneration, encourage new routines for water-saving hygiene, create a place of well-being with minimal energy consumption and make the necessary use of water a conscious experience. Hansgrohe's Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture will celebrate its premiere in front of an international audience at ISH 2023.

How will we use the bathroom in the future? How important is the personal need for hygiene? How important will it be for people to have a place of retreat at home that protects them from sensory overload and provides mental peace? How can these needs be combined as efficiently as possible to meet the challenge of increasing urbanization and the resulting smaller living spaces? And: How can this be achieved without compromising personal needs at the expense of resources such as water and energy?

A Bathroom in Harmony with Humans and Nature

What sounds like a classic conflict of goals is a driver for sustainable innovation for the Hansgrohe Group. Together with the Stuttgart-based design and innovation studio PHOENIX, Hansgrohe has developed a bathroom that is in harmony with humans and nature: Hansgrohe's Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture. Conceptually, it goes far beyond the sustainability triad "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle". It's all about "rethinking" - rethinking and questioning our daily routines and rituals in the bathroom as we know them today, because only through sustainable behavioral change can we reduce our carbon footprint in the long run. 

Rethinking the Bathroom

In order to rethink the bathroom, we first need an understanding of what the bathroom stands for today and the habits that will be the future drivers of a sustainable bathroom. To shed light on sustainable bathroom rituals from different perspectives, a qualitative analysis was conducted. The exchange with various experts and pioneers from the fields of sustainability, health and architecture combined with personal interviews formed the basis for the conception of the Hansgrohe Green Vision. Four areas of insight could be derived from these comprehensive results:

Beyond Water: In the bathroom, mental needs are satisfied through resource-intensive rituals. It serves as a place of retreat, an emotional cocoon. We create a new place that focuses on mental hygiene and enables regeneration that conserves resources.

Conscious Hygiene: Convenient hygiene rituals are firmly anchored in everyday life and have a very high water consumption. A new type of water-saving hygiene not only helps the environment, but also keeps our skin healthy. We create new, simple routines for this.

Warm Nest: Nowhere is the physical and emotional need for warmth greater than in the bathroom. At the same time, today's bathrooms are often very cold due to the choice of colors and materials - which is compensated for by intensive heating or high hot water consumption. Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water creates a place of well-being that lets you feel both physical warmth and security, with minimal energy consumption.

Empowering Knowledge: Even people who live their lives with the environment in mind often have no awareness of their concrete resource consumption. To enable a sustainable change in behavior, water consumption must be made tangible.