William Lim’s LIMBONSAI Partners with COLOURLIVING

Architect and artist William Lim’s bathroom brand LIMBONSAI has partnered with COLOURLIVING to launch a bathroom design, build and styling service, celebrating original Chinese design, craft and manufacturing. We spoke to Lim to find out more about the brand and its first collection

Suzy Annetta: Where did the idea for LIMBONSAI come from, and what are your aspirations for the brand?

William Lim: We would like LIMBONSAI to evolve into a lifestyle brand, and we’re starting with the bathroom collection. The way it started is that in many of my projects we try to source bathroom fittings, and we noticed the choice is quite limited. We do projects that are reflective of Asian design and sensibilities, but we ended up having to source generic taps and not taps that consider the Asian aesthetic. On my travels, I’ve noticed that I have problems with hotel bathroom taps, the minimal ones especially, when my hands are wet or soapy. There are limitations that I see in the sanitary fittings, and that’s why I decided to come up with a new design.

How did the partnership with COLOURLIVING come about?

After I came up with the design for the Bonsai Collection, we started looking for fabricators and found a few sources. We’re working with a company who has an office and production facilities in China — they produce for many international brands. Given the nature of the design, I thought it would be very interesting to produce in Asia. This company has also worked with COLOURLIVING for other product launches in the past. We showed Denise Lau, the founder of COLOURLIVING, very early on, before it was even mass produced. We showed her the prototype and she was excited from that moment, which is why we thought she’d be a good partner to launch it with. That was two years ago, so the relationship has been since the beginning.

What was your inspiration and approach to the design of the first collection?

I like to think of the bathroom as not a standard bathroom, but more as part of an interesting lifestyle, something that’s artistic even. We work on a lot of hotel projects and the bathrooms are becoming increasingly open to the rest of the room and part of the overall environment. With that in mind, I started to question whether the basin fittings always have to be a symmetrical element, and so utilitarian. I started to wonder, what if it’s not symmetrical? What if it’s not just utilitarian but more of an art piece? And back to the problem of trying to turn a knob with wet hands, I started to think maybe it could be more moulded to fit my grip. So, I started to play with clay models to see the shapes that I could play with, all the while thinking it didn’t have to be symmetrical. I also wanted to go back to a more traditional approach of separate taps rather than a central mixer. What if we made it more of a lifestyle object and break down the utilitarian thinking, making it more of an art piece or a sculpture? 

Bonsai is an artistic element that Asians have used in different cultures for centuries. It originated in China and spread to Japan and Korea, and I think Japan really made it into a celebrated art form. There are rocks and plants and other elements within bonsai, so I thought about using a few of these elements to make the fixtures. That’s how the idea came about. I wanted them to be easy to turn and so I started to mould them to my hands, and one became almost like a branch and the like other a rock, and I played with that idea for a while. Then I started to think that the faucet itself could be like a waterfall instead of a typical jet. Bit by bit, the ideas came about. But of course, I can’t design in a vacuum, so around that time, we started to talk to the manufacturer about the technical requirements and limitations and discussed the idea of creating moulds. We used some of the products he’d already developed and worked with those to create new moulds. Each part requires a new mould. We spent about a year developing the idea and the moulds and prototypes.

Can you tell us about the materials used and the production process?

We wanted to create a luxury design product that also could be kind of customised. We came up with a material palette of three standard finishes: a white chrome-plated metal, a dark, almost charcoal, metal chrome-plating and a third brass colour. We can also work with combinations of these finishes to provide other options like black and gold or gold and white. The combinations work out really nicely and give a lot more options. Somewhere down the line we’d like to do customised knobs, in materials like jade or other stones. Some of those ideas came from the COLOURLIVING team, who have many years of experience in the luxury sanitary fixtures industry.

What’s next for LIMBONSAI?

We want to expand into a more all-encompassing lifestyle concept. At COLOURLIVING, we’re starting to develop other products like a full line of bathroom accessories, and basins and tubs will be the next group of products we design. We’re also looking at expanding into design services. 

As told to / Suzy Annetta