Joan Lao, design for the senses
"The bathroom can be the ideal space to find yourself, to look after yourself and to reflect. It should be compulsory to see it like that!"
"The bathroom can be the ideal space to find yourself, to look after yourself and to reflect. It should be compulsory to see it like that!"
He welcomes us at his main studio located on one of the most important arteries in Barcelona, on Balmes Street. From here, Joan Lao leads a team that shares his same creative vision. All his work exudes an aura of sensibility and naturalness that is easy to perceive yet difficult to transmit. Below this first layer, there is enormous professional work, based on geometric principles, noble materials and soft colours. With no stridency, and a great sense of timelessness.
Faithful to his vision of design as a way of capturing a concept, he has been applying it to interior design, architecture and furniture design for more than 30 years. Having designed almost 3,000 interior design projects and more than 12,000 references of pieces of furniture, lamps, tapestries and decorative objects, Joan Lao is one of the most internationally acclaimed Spanish designers due to his outstanding creative capacity and his vision as a creator, producer and, above all, as an explorer and cultural driving force. His distinct stylistic imprint, perfectly in line with nature and away from fashion trends, turns into creations that last throughout time providing warmth, balance and simplicity, three necessary qualities he himself highlights to live in perfect harmony.
For Joan Lao, time is unique, art is emotion, light is calmness, nature is the origin of all things, design is essential, ethics are fundamental in life and in work and water is pure life. For a moment we get lost in reflections on design, on life spaces and on the role played by the bathroom in the physical and emotional health of people. He confesses to being in a phase of creative transmutation; a period of “new approaches and a better use of time, a time to consider what is really essential and to choose what, how, where and with whom.”
The bathroom can be the ideal space to find yourself