Considering the holistic way we approach interiors today, it’s easy to forget that the bathroom wasn’t always part of the design conversation. A new book, The Art of the Bath, looks back at how Sherle Wagner helped raise its status from a strictly functional space to a decorative one, with the company’s sculptural Swan taps among its most enduring designs.
When Sherle and Rose Wagner launched their closet design business in Manhattan in 1945, it gave them access to some of the city’s finest homes — including the most intimate spaces. Sherle noticed that the bathroom was often overlooked from a design standpoint and saw an opportunity to expand the business, notes his granddaughter, author Marissa Wagner Geoffroy. “Sherle recognized what others had missed: the bath could be as expressive and refined as any room in the home,” she says.
Sherle began designing decorative bath fittings and fixtures with an eye on elevating everyday touch points. His first tap, the Dolphin, was the first of its kind in the American market and took inspiration from historical French fountains, scaled down for residential use. The Swan followed and became a symbol of his belief that something functional could also be beautiful. “In many ways, Sherle Wagner invented the luxury plumbing market, helping transform bath culture,” says interior designer Oliver Furth in the foreword. “Previously, these were purely utilitarian spaces, and the fixtures our hands turned were simply extensions of the pipes and fittings behind the walls.” Pre-existing designs, he explains, were based on outdated Victorian motifs.
Cast in bronze and frequently plated in gold, the Swan owes much of its allure to craftsmanship. Sherle Wagner resisted the industry’s move toward lower-cost overseas production, eventually bringing manufacturing under its own roof in Massachusetts by the 1990s. The company still uses lost-wax casting, a traditional method which requires skilled artisans and specialist equipment, to capture the Swan’s detailed feathering before each piece is finished by hand.
By the 1950s, the design was popular enough to be copied, prompting a characteristically cheeky Sherle Wagner advertisement warning customers, “Don’t be fooled by decoys!” At that time, the firm worked with advertising executive Leonard Sacks, largely considered one of the original Mad Men, on a series of such ads. Later campaigns shared the same wit — including a 1980s ad featuring a young Geoffroy.
Celebrity clients were also par for the course. Frank Sinatra and Jackie Kennedy were among the company’s early customers, while jazz great Louis Armstrong was photographed at home alongside his Swan fittings for a 1971 TIME article, ‘How the Other Half Bathes’. In that same article, Sherle was quoted as saying, “Today’s bathroom is an escape area from these times of tension. It has become a spa at home.” Some things haven’t changed!
More than half a century later, Sherle’s ‘home spa’ theory still feels current. And the Swan tap has become something of an icon, specified by contemporary firms like Hines Collective and Billy Cotton (whose use of it in Lily Allen and David Harbour’s former Brooklyn townhouse went viral). Perhaps Oliver Furth summed it up best, when he described its unlikely journey from coveted status symbol to near cliché and now modern classic: “Water issuing from the mouth of a gilt bird should be absurd, but instead it becomes ceremonial.”
Photos: The Art of the Bath, courtesy of Rizzoli