3daysofdesign files: Exploring the Perfect Pair in Bathing with Bread and Butter

Bathing is one of the oldest and most universal gestures in human experience. Long before it became associated with hygiene, it was a ritual, social, and spiritual act. In almost every culture, water does more than cleanse the body: it creates a space of suspension, a threshold between different states of being. To immerse oneself is to slow down, to listen, to let go. It is a moment in which time loses its everyday rigidity and the body regains a quiet centrality. 

As Gaston Bachelard wrote in Water and Dreams: “Water is the mistress of fluid language, of language without shock, of continuous and uninterrupted language.” In water, thought relaxes and the body remembers itself.

Even in contemporary cities, the public bath continues to represent a kind of parenthesis: a place where the body ceases to be performative and returns to being vulnerable, perceptive, human. Bathing is therefore a practice that constantly oscillates between intimacy and sharing. It is a private ritual often performed alongside others, in a proximity made of minimal gestures, steam, muted sounds, and objects passed from hand to hand.

It is precisely within this tension that Bread and Butter - Second Edition: Perfect Pair in Bathing takes shape. Following a first edition presented during 3daysofdesign 2025, which explored conviviality through “the perfect pair in dining,” the project now extends its reflection to another everyday ritual: bathing. If dining investigated relationships through nourishment and the shared table, bathing shifts the conversation toward a more corporeal, sensory, and introspective dimension.

The exhibition, curated by Ae Office and Pyeori Jung, brings together sixteen designers from Denmark, Finland, Korea, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom, invited to reflect on the concept of the “perfect pair” within the universe of bathing. The objects on display emerge from different cultural practices yet converge around a common idea: that of relationship. Functional, aesthetic, or symbolic pairings take form through everyday rituals, gestures of personal care, or moments of attention toward others.

In this context, design ceases to be merely a formal exercise and becomes a relational device. Objects never exist in isolation: they enter into dialogue with one another, complete an experience, suggest a rhythm. A jug and a basin, a seat and a towel, a light and steam. Each pair constructs a domestic microcosm in which the bathing experience is transformed into cultural language.

The participating designers, including Maria Bruun, John Tree, Ville Kokkonen, Shizuka Tatsuno, Tom Chung, and Studio Word, bring highly diverse perspectives on the relationship between body, material, and ritual. Some works look toward vernacular bathing traditions, while others reinterpret contemporary tools and behaviors, yet all share a sensitivity to the slow and tactile dimension of the experience.

At a historical moment dominated by speed and hyperconnectivity, Bread and Butter chooses instead to dwell on an elemental and necessary gesture. Bathing thus becomes a form of everyday resistance: an unproductive, vulnerable, almost meditative time. And perhaps this is where the exhibition finds its most compelling point - in suggesting that the objects inhabiting our most intimate rituals speak not only about function, but about the way we choose to exist in the world and alongside others. Because every ritual, even the simplest one, always contains the possibility of relationship. And perhaps today, more than searching for new objects, what we truly need are new ways of inhabiting the gestures we already know.

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Words: Simone Lorusso
Photography: Peter William Vinther