Adamsez

Adamsez has been making baths since 1880, when M.J. and S.H. Adams set up in Newcastle upon Tyne to produce sanitary ceramics. The firm made its name on bathtubs, won gold medals at the tenth and sixteenth Triennale di Milano, moved to Belfast in the 1980s and is now based in Newtownards. It is a rare thing in this trade: a British bath maker with more than 140 years behind it that is still designing new baths rather than reissuing old ones.

The Stone collection is the heart of it. Each bath is cast from AdCast, a composite stone resin, then hand-finished – nine shapes that run from the architectural Thompson and Harland to the softer Lewis, Mila and Santo, with the faceted Geo somewhere of its own. The same material makes the wash basins, eleven of them, and the AdCast countertops they sit on. AdColour will match the outside of a bath to a RAL number, or to a tile or a piece of furniture you bring in, in gloss, satin, matt or metallic. For acrylic there is the AdVance range, along with AdStone shower trays and bath screens.

Two things make the collection worth the money. The guarantee is for the lifetime of the first domestic owner, on baths, basins and countertops alike – the composite surface is repairable rather than disposable, which is what makes that promise possible. And the baths are cast using 100% renewable energy. Adamsez now sits alongside Aqualla inside the FM Mattsson Mora Group, which is how a bath and its brassware end up matching. Come and run a hand along one in Swansea; photographs do not convey the weight of them.