Interview: Hugo Volpei on bringing Trone's sculptural WCs to the UK luxury bathroom market

French company Trone aims to revolutionise the toilet industry, founder Hugo Volpei tells Amelia Thorpe, as he introduces the brand at West One Bathrooms.

As a student at business school about a decade a go, French-born Hugo Volpei spent a weekend staying with a friend in London. Together they went for a drink at Sketch, the well-known theatrical restaurant-bar in the centre of the capital. "I was amazed by the loos," he says of the futuristic design by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrence – each WC is enclosed in an egg-shaped pod, underneath a multi-coloured ceiling, which is the stuff of Instagram legend. "I thought it was incredible that so many people were taking selfies of themselves in a toilet."

When he went back home to Paris, Volpei found himself mulling the phenomenon. "While the pods themselves were amazing, I felt there was an opportunity to go further," he explains. "When you enter the 'egg', the toilet itself is completely conventional, so I began to wonder whether it was possible to design a really beautiful one." The idea played on his mind, so much so that a year or 2 later when he had completed his business studies, he asked his architect friend Romain Freychet to design a new WC, with desirability at the forefront the brief.

The year was 2018, and Volpei set up Trone (French for ‘throne’) to launch their first model, Icone, a glossy, colourful and circular floorstanding toilet, which features a distinctive translucent water column. With a 3D render of the product, he approached the founders of the Big Mamma group of trend-setting restaurants. "Everyone was looking at this brand at the time and I heard they were due to be opening another restaurant in Paris," recalls Volpei. "When they said, 'let’s go for it', we had 6 months to launch 7 toilets." And he admits to knowing absolutely nothing about manufacturing sanitaryware. "I began by searching 'how to make a toilet' on Google."

Clearly his searches were successful: today Trone offers a ‘whole bathroom’ collection including WCs, basins, taps and accessories, with a focus on bold design and imaginative colour. Products are all manufactured in Europe, focused on France and Italy for ceramics. "Last year we shipped 10,000 pieces to our clients in 35 different countries," says Volpei.

The main markets are France, followed by UK, Belgium, Holland and Germany. And with a focus on growing the UK market, Trone has just announced its partnership with West One Bathrooms. "They are our first retailer worldwide," he says. "London has so many architects working internationally, so it is important for us to be here – and our ambition is for the UK to become a market as significant as France for us in 5 years, if the venture is as successful as I think it’s going to be."

The most recent launch is the new smart toilet Altesse, designed to be sculptural in shape and simple to use. "I have a conviction that we are all going to have a smart toilet in the future, because it is more hygienic than paper and more ecological," he says. "We want to bring beauty to this category and to design a compact model, since every other smart toilet seems to be big," he says. "And I also noticed that whenever I talk about Japanese-style shower toilets, people always say that they are too complicated to use, with so many buttons, and they are afraid of the water going everywhere." Altesse provides a wand for both front and rear wash, automatic drying and self-cleaning before and after each use.

We can expect new products in the autumn, likely followed by Trone’s first range of showers. "All products," says Volpei emphatically, "will push the boundaries of design."