Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water – The Bathroom of The Future

Innovation for Sustainability: Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water – The Bathroom of The Future

[Find Hansgrohe on Product Finder]

Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture means bringing the bathroom space 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 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? Will there be an increased need 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 urbanisation 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?

These questions have been a clear driver for sustainable innovation by 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 intends to go beyond the sustainability triad “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”. Conceptually, it’s all about rethinking and questioning our daily routines and rituals in the bathroom, because only through sustainable behavioural change can we reduce our carbon footprint in the long-term.

Rethinking the Bathroom

To rethink bathroom culture, an understanding of what the bathroom stands for today and the habits that will be the future drivers of sustainable bathrooms in the future, was vital. Hansgrohe conducted qualitative analysis with various experts and pioneers from the fields of sustainability, health, and architecture to help shed light on sustainable bathroom rituals from different perspectives. These personal interviews formed the basis of Hansgrohe’s Green Vision alongside four key areas of insight:

  • Beyond Water: In the bathroom, mental needs are satisfied through resource-intensive rituals. It serves as a place of retreat, an emotional cocoon. In future, we need to create a place that focuses on mental hygiene and enables regeneration whilst conserving resources.
  • Conscious Hygiene: Convenient hygiene rituals are firmly anchored in everyday life; however, they often consume high amounts of water. New, simple routines that incorporate water-saving will not only help the environment, but also keeps skin healthy.
  • Warm Nest: The physical and emotional need for warmth in the bathroom is something we’re all familiar with. However, today’s bathrooms are often very cold due to the choice of colours and materials, and this is compounded with energy-intensive heating and high level hot water consumption. Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water creates a place of well-being that provides a feeling of 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 behaviour, water consumption must be made tangible.

Steffen Erath, Head of Innovation & Sustainability at Hansgrohe SE, said: “With Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water, we are ending the age of extreme hot water consumption in the bathroom for the pure satisfaction of hygiene and wellness needs. A bathroom that uses 90% less water and energy than today’s bathrooms, is our consistent response to, and vision for, the current and upcoming water and energy crisis.”

Matthias Oesterle, Design Director at PHOENIX, added: “Global warming and our use of resources must be reconsidered. The sanitary industry will have to develop new solutions that are not only produced more sustainably, but above all enable more efficient use of resources in the bathroom. With the Green Vision, we are accompanying Hansgrohe in making the challenges that this rethinking entails tangible and addressing them in a targeted manner.”

Hans Jürgen Kalmbach, Chairman of the Executive Board of Hansgrohe SE also comments: “Our award-winning Innovation Lab works like a start-up. It uses a clearly defined innovation process to develop sustainable concepts, not only for the user but also the planet. Our innovative technologies help people change behaviours that harm the environment whilst still enjoying relaxing and spa-like experiences.”

Premiere at ISH 2023

Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture will celebrate its premiere in front of an international audience at ISH 2023. The world’s leading sanitary trade fair will take place in Frankfurt, Germany from March 13 to 17, 2023. Afterwards, Hansgrohe’s Green Vision will go on tour and invite public discourse on “Rethinking Bathroom Culture”. Hansgrohe has already been cultivating this for years as part of the Hansgrohe Water Symposium, where this year numerous experts for water and climate protection exchanged ideas within the realm of “Valuable Water”.

Contact Hansgrohe through Product Finder

Product Finder enables Commercial Interior Designers to source products and services from accredited Commercial Suppliers. Search through over 200 UK suppliers, each showcasing newly launched products, projects, catalogues, films, sector research and much more.

Share

About Alys Bryan

Alys is a knowledgeable design editor who is focused on instigating conversations, both online and in-person, with industry experts which challenge, educate and advance the commercial interior sector. Her training and 15 years of professional experience as a furniture designer for the commercial sector makes her uniquely placed to lead Design Insider as Editor
View all posts by Alys Bryan →