In January 2020, Will Cooper, partner and chief creative officer at ASH NYC, took a trip to India. As he made his way through Rajasthan and cities like Agra, Mumbai, and New Delhi, he was struck by “all the vibrancy—the saris, the markets, the spices, the jewels,” he recalls.
It was those vivid images that came to the forefront when ASH NYC began designing the retro-inspired bathrooms for Ulysses, its forthcoming hotel housed in a 1911 building in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. “We were customizing everything for this project, and it felt like the plumbing fittings were the last piece we needed,” Cooper explains. Working with Waterworks, he crafted Highgate, a limited-edition capsule collection.
ASH NYC has been a fan of Waterworks for a decade now, so collaborating with the bath and kitchen company to extend its vision for dynamic bathrooms was a natural fit. Highgate’s porcelain handles, buoyed by solid brass components, are available for sink faucets, floor-mounted exposed tub fillers, and thermostatic and volume control shower valves in four cheerful colorways of azure blue, cerise red, citron yellow, and jade green. “Using red, blue, yellow, and green as a lens, you can understand the façade of color,” Cooper points out.
Cooper was inspired by his travels in India for Waterworks’ Highgate collection, which features bathroom fixtures in multiple colors, including azure blue
Designing eye-catching hotel bathrooms has long been an ASH NYC hallmark. There are the black ones at the Dean in Providence, as well as the terrazzo-covered walls and floors at the Siren in Detroit and the arched showers flaunting a series of vertical stripes at Hotel Peter and Paul in New Orleans. “Developing different colors becomes a way to offer different experiences,” Cooper points out.
Highgate subtly injects an element of surprise into hospitality settings, a characteristic that Cooper hopes to see more of. “A hotel is a transient place,” he says, “and it’s an opportunity for designers to do something wild and live in a fantasy or a movie set.
This article originally appeared in HD’s December 2021 issue.
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