Trone: The Art of Reinventing the Bathroom, Exclusively at West One Bathrooms
A Paris design studio has spent a decade quietly dismantling everything we thought we knew about sanitaryware. Now, it arrives in the UK.
Photography, West One Bathrooms.
Bathroom objects used daily, designed centuries ago, and largely unchanged - they exist as functional necessities, rarely considered as designed objects, almost never celebrated as beautiful ones. A Paris studio called Tronehas spent years treating that problem as an invitation and now in partnership withWest One Bathrooms, they’re available in the UK.
The brand's name, French for throne, signals its position immediately: this is sanitaryware reconsidered from first principles, approaching the bathroom the way a sculptor approaches material, with curiosity about what form might emerge if convention is set aside entirely. The results, pieces like the Icone toilet with its architectural translucent water column, and the Rituel basin shaped by the erosive logic of water itself, are objects that make you look twice, not because they are eccentric, but because they are genuinely, disarmingly beautiful.
"There is nothing quite like it in the UK market. For our clients — whether homeowners, architects, or interior designers — this is an opportunity to access a truly special collection that elevates the bathroom to something memorable." — Duncan Waters, Managing Director, West One Bathrooms
What Happens When a Toilet Becomes a Sculpture
The broader design world has spent the past decade reassessing the bathroom. Once a purely functional room, it has evolved into one of the most considered spaces in the contemporary home, a place where materiality, light and mood are curated with the same attention as a living room or bedroom. And yet sanitaryware itself has largely resisted this cultural shift. Tiles, fittings, surfaces have all evolved; the fundamental forms of the basin and toilet have not.
Trone's founding premise challenges that stasis directly. Working from a Paris studio and producing through specialist ceramic artisans across France, Italy and Portugal, the brand draws its references not from bathroom design history but from natural phenomena: the geometry of water in motion, the forms left by erosion, the visual logic of translucency and light. The Icone toilet's water column is not decorative; it is structural, and the fact that it is also arresting is the point. Function does not have to preclude beauty. In Trone's world, the two are inseparable.
Clerkenwell and the UK Moment
For those following our Clerkenwell Design Week 2026 coverage, Trone's UK arrival is one of the week's more significant design stories. West One Bathrooms, which has represented over 750 international brands across its London, Surrey and Southeast showrooms since 1978, becomes the first and currently only UK retailer to stock the collection, with the Clerkenwell showroom serving as the launch point. It is a considered pairing: a third-generation family business with deep design-trade credibility introducing a brand that operates at the precise edge of where bathroom design is heading.
The launch coincides with a broader shift we have been tracking in interiors: a move toward bathrooms that are genuinely designed environments rather than rooms that happen to contain sanitaryware. Trone is not the only brand moving in this direction, but it may be the one doing so with the most formal rigour and the most evident pleasure in the process.
Design Across 15 Countries, Now Here
Already present in 15 countries and installed across leading hospitality and residential projects internationally, Trone arrives in the UK with an established body of work and a clear design identity. Founder Hugo Volpei describes the brand's ambition as bringing together design, engineering and European craftsmanship to create something refined, and it is a description the objects themselves bear out. These are pieces designed to last, to age well, and to hold their presence in a room for decades rather than seasons.
We find ourselves thinking about what it means for a bathroom object to be truly considered. Not just finished carefully but conceived differently: from the question of what it might become rather than what it has always been. Trone answers that question with objects that feel, in the best sense, surprising. Not radical for its own sake, but genuinely new in a category that has needed it for a very long time.
Design to Know
The Trone collection launches at West One Bathrooms' Clerkenwell showroom during Clerkenwell Design Week 2026, with a wider rollout across the UK showroom network to follow. West One Bathrooms is currently the first and only UK retailer stocking Trone. The brand is designed in Paris and produced by specialist ceramic artisans across France, Italy and Portugal, with collections spanning toilets, basins, mixers and accessories.
The Clerkenwell showroom is in London's EC1, with further locations across Surrey and the South East. Explore the full collection at westonebathrooms.com.
Discover the Trone collection at westonebathrooms.com or visit the Clerkenwell showroom, London EC1. Read our Clerkenwell Design Week 2026 feature here
Photography courtesy of West One Bathrooms.
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