Domus Antoniolupi: where the bathroom becomes home

In the Roman domus each room had a name, a function and a precise rhythm. The spaces were organized along a continuous axis, from atrium to tablinum to peristyle, in a sequence in which the passage from one room to another was both architectural and social. The domus was an integrated system: each room dialogued with the others, and the quality of living was measured by the coherence of the whole. It is an idea of space that is now back in the news in the way we think of the home, and especially the bathroom. For decades confined to a purely technical function, today it has acquired a new centrality as the place for self-care, an intimate but no longer isolated room, which engages with the rest of the house and influences it. There is an increasingly fine distinction between living quarters, sleeping quarters and bathroom, requiring not just technical skills but a design vision capable of combining functionality, materials and feelings. 

This is exactly the field of investigation of Antoniolupi, a Tuscan company that for years has extended its research from the bathroom to the living room, bringing the same quality materials, the same formal coherence and the same sartorial attitude to the project in both areas. For the Salone del Mobile 2026, the company will translate this vision into architecture with the Domus Antoniolupi: not a trade fair display in the traditional sense, but a space to be walked through and inhabited. 

The project, designed by Giorgio Rava, will develop as a sequence of five rooms organized around a central space, mirroring the layout of the atrium in the ancient Roman house. Each room will offer a different interpretation of the relationship between bathroom and living room, creating interiors in which furnishings, surfaces and elements related to water will coexist within a single domestic landscape. 

This year Antoniolupi wants to reverse the usual order of things. “Usually you have the products and then you ask an architect to build a display around them. We worked the opposite way,” says Andrea Lupi, the company’s CEO and art director. “The Domus project came first and the products followed. It is as if we had made them to suit the space, the presentation.” The stand – about 900 square meters in Pavilion 22 (A05–A07), accessible only with guided tours – will be configured as an installation in which the fusion between bathroom and living room takes concrete shape. “We want to recount antoniolupi’s new image,” explains Lupi, “and show people that these two worlds can coexist in the same space.” 

“Unlike many exhibition stands, where there is a tendency to show as many finishes as possible, we have chosen only two materials: Evo oak and Botticino marble. Quintessence and coherence,” says the artistic director. Evo oak is a new natural and tactile finish; combined with Botticino, it will define a warm and uniform colour landscape in which the products will emerge without competing with the context.