Bathroom Trade. For a broad range of great value top quality products.
Marc Francis
When I was a boy I used to go with mum to visit her friend about 10 miles away from our house - not because I wanted to, but because, as a ten year old, you're better off zipping it and tagging along. But I would always find that, having arrived, I half enjoyed the experience. Occupying myself with things to do while they caught up on all the latest gossip I would drift around my mum's friends place and look for things to do.
Armed with an Action Man toy figurine I would seek out enemy bases in the prisitine reception room - which was never used by anybody and who's sofas were forever entombed in plastic, and install my action figure in cupboard hideaways in the dining room. But there is a memory which has always staid with me from those visits and that's the difficulty I had negotiating the door to the kitchen. Those old enough to have grown up in the seventies will remember among other things the plastic runners that adorned the entry hall way. Perhaps you can remember the transparent orange Bambi figures that occupied most mantle pieces. Well I can also remember a plastic concertina door finished in a wood pattern that would never ever open properly. It didn't move smoothly in it's runners at the top and had no runners at the bottom. so it just flapped about cheaply. In fact I was the one that broke it as I flew Action Man into the no-fly-zone in the kitchen. It wasn't my fault, of course. No. It was like that when I got there.
And so when my mum suggested that she wanted a shower with a concertina door, you can imagine the thoughts that popped into my head. I had images of mum getting into the shower (not a nice thing to think about) and struggling with a flappy plastic excuse for a door, slipping about and splashing water all over the place. That is, until I saw the Bi-Fold shower enclosure from New Era.
As a species, human beings have come a long way in folding door technology since the 70's and the New Era Bi-Fold shower enclosure is a perfect example of this. Focusing on the mechanisms which anchor the door in place, New Era have created a door which moves with pneumatic ease. And when it closes, a hidden magnetic strip couples it with the minimalist aluminum frame with a satisfying kiss.
Unlike in the seventies when designers thought that lots of bells and whistles on a product made it better, New Era have gone the opposite way and stripped the enclosure down to it's bare essentials. In fact the design is so minimal as to be almost invisible in the bathroom. This means that it will look good well into the future. But some of the cleverest innovations are naked to the human eye. Easiclean, their patented glass technology, pools water droplets on the glasses surface and makes them roll off the pane in sheets along with the dirt. This means that mum won't have to continually clean the thing.
And so this is the shower she wants. A New Era Bi-Fold enclosure with a nostalgic door planted firmly in the future and one of absolutely no interest to Action Man wielding ten year olds.
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