The Portaluppi Bathroom is the New “It” Loo

The dominance of the gray-and-white “spa bathroom,” may be waning. You know the ones—spare, mostly white, flooded with light, and sheathed in acres of Calacatta Viola marble. The new look involves dramatically veined stone in dark green or dusky red, sculptural Art Deco-style fixtures, and rich woodwork. Think: the bathrooms of AD cover stars like interior designer Athena Calderone and supermodel Paloma Elsesser. The reference point is 1930s Milan, where bold material combinations and precise geometry turned these utilitarian spaces into showpieces.

Few designers are as identified with this look as Piero Portaluppi (1888-1967), the Rationalist architect behind the iconic Villa Necchi Campiglio and Casa Corbellini-Wassermann. While his dramatic entry halls and sweeping stairs have inspired designers for decades, it’s the rooms with plumbing that are currently having a moment.

At Villa Necchi, mirrored walls multiply the swirling patterns of Arabescato Orobico marble, while at nearby Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, Portaluppi set vibrant green Verde Challant marble against graphic black stonework. “He frequently used contrasting materials to frame hallways, thresholds, and architectural elements, allowing these moments of juxtaposition to draw the eye and bring a sense of ceremony to the space,” explains Calderone, who visited Villa Necchi with architect Danielle Siggerud while reimagining her own Tribeca apartment.

AD100 designer Gregory Rockwell says he is drawn to the period’s unconventional palette. “What I love about Portaluppi is how controlled everything is architecturally, but then he’ll do something extravagant with the marble or an unexpected color,” the designer says. For the primary bathroom of Elsesser’s Brooklyn townhouse, Rockwell and colleague Hester Hodde layered burgundy Rosso Francia marble, walnut-and-mirror paneling, and pistachio-green walls. “It’s a slightly strange combination when you think about it, but I love the colors together,” he says.

For Calderone, the magic is in the stonework. “There was such ingenuity in the way Portaluppi clad entire bathrooms in stone, often using smaller, individually composed pieces,” she says. For her primary bathroom, she edged sweeping expanses of pale stone with intricate inlaid tile borders and added Art Deco-inflected fixtures and geometric mirrors. Looking back at Portaluppi’s examples, she observes: “It feels almost at odds with how we approach stone today, where expansive, perfectly bookmatched slabs have become the prevailing ideal. He embraced the irregularity and variation in the veining.” That appreciation for the individuality of natural stone is also on display in her powder room, which features a pedestal sink in deeply veined Verde Alpi marble.

Another sink in the same deep-green stone can be found in the powder room of a Milan pied-à-terre Giampiero Tagliaferri recently designed for a young art collector. “The custom pedestal sink takes its bold, geometric form from Rationalist architecture, but we kept the lines clean and the layout modern,” Tagliaferri explains. As the designer explains, revisiting 1930s Milan isn’t about exactly replicating a Portaluppi bathroom. “Reinterpretation is about extracting a period’s core DNA, not literal replication.”

That thinking extends beyond bespoke interiors. New bath collections are borrowing from the Portaluppi bathroom vocabulary, offering ways to incorporate patterned stone, geometric forms, and saturated color without a full-scale renovation. Artistic Tile’s Calacatta Gold marble mosaic brings the intricacy of Calderone’s inlaid borders to walls and floors, while Kelly Wearstler’s oxblood-hued Treillage tile for Ann Sacks puts a dimensional spin on the burgundy tones of Elsesser’s bathroom. For Clé Tile, Reath Design created marbleized patterns that evoke the movement of natural stone. The influence extends to smaller details: Charles Edwards’s alabaster dish light has an Art Deco–inspired silhouette, while Crate & Barrel’s Verde Green marble soap pump and tissue holder bring the distinctive color and veining of those Verde Alpi sinks down to countertop scale.

Whether it’s an entire room wrapped in marble or a single well-chosen detail, the impulse is much the same. “I’ve never really understood why bathrooms should be any less interesting than the rest of the house,” Rockwell says. “They might as well be beautiful and exciting.”