The Jathtub

The inside is not denim. This was settled permanently in month four.

$8,700

Installed. Survey required before order.

A sealed composite bath, clad on its outer faces in reclaimed denim held six millimetres off the shell so that air moves behind the cloth and nothing ever sits damp against it. The water never touches fabric. The fabric never touches water. Everything else about this product is a consequence of holding those two sentences to be non-negotiable.

Development

Four thousand fills

You cannot model what thirty years of bathing does to a cladding seam, so we filled and drained a single Jathtub four thousand times over nineteen months, to the overflow, at 40°C, with a technician logging the lower hem every hundredth cycle. The first specification wicked at the plinth by cycle 600. The second held to 2,900. The third — the ventilated gap, the raised hem, the drainage channel in the plinth — finished four thousand cycles indistinguishable from the day it was built.

31 Months in development
4,000 Fill and drain cycles
3 Cladding specifications

The meeting in month four

Early in development somebody asked the obvious question, which is whether the interior could be denim too — sealed, treated, some arrangement that would make the piece complete. We spent a week on it. The answer is that any coating durable enough to hold back standing water at bathing temperature is thick enough that you are no longer touching cloth, you are touching a plastic surface with a photograph of cloth underneath it. We closed the question in month four and have not reopened it since.

What survived is a product that is honest about being two things bolted together: a perfectly ordinary sealed bath, and an exterior that is doing something nobody else does. The join between them is a six-millimetre ventilated air gap, and that gap is the single most considered detail in our catalogue.

In the crate

Survey, delivery, and installation by our team
Cast brass feet, adjustable, with floor protectors
A spare cladding panel in your run’s wash grade
Twenty-year warranty on the shell; lifetime on the cladding
A denim interior. Closed permanently in month four of development.
Taps and waste, which are yours to choose and ours to fit.

Ownership

Care

Ventilate the room after bathing. The gap works; the room must too.
Wipe splash off the outer faces rather than letting it dry.
Check the plinth drainage channel is clear twice a year.
Never seal the air gap, whatever a plumber tells you.

Questions we are asked

Before you commit

Is the inside denim?

No. Absolutely not. The interior is a sealed acrylic composite shell and the question of an interior denim surface was closed permanently in month four of development, in a meeting we still refer to.

What happens when water runs down the outside?

It runs off. The hem is raised clear of the plinth and the plinth has a drainage channel cut into it. This is the arrangement that survived four thousand fill-and-drain cycles; the two before it did not.

Will it grow mildew?

Not in a ventilated bathroom. The six-millimetre gap exists so air can move behind the cladding, but it cannot dry a room that has no extraction. We ask about your ventilation at survey and we have declined installations on the answer.

Can the cladding be removed?

Yes, in about twenty minutes, and it must be before any waste or overflow work. The shell underneath is a standard bath and any plumber can service it without our involvement.

What does it feel like to lean against?

Like a sealed composite bath, because that is what you are leaning against. The denim is entirely outboard. Owners expecting to bathe against cloth are the ones we most want to have read this page.

The Jathtub

Four thousand fills

The meeting in month four

In the crate

Care

The Jink

The Joilet

The Jarpet