Sussex Style Magazine Feature - & So To Bathe
It was a sudden and unexpected twist 25 years ago that took Jim Paddley to owning a luxury bathroom company. Working as a plumbing and heating engineer in Sussex, he slipped on a customer’s icy driveway: “My knee snapped at the knee joint -- bang. It was a clean break and I had to have a whole new knee put in. That put pay to my plumbing days.”
Jim is showing me around & So To Bathe’s brand new showroom in Horsham, the fruits of two decades’ worth of re-inventing himself on the management side of the bathroom industry. He winces at the story of his accident, but adds: “I probably wouldn’t be here without that twist of fate. It’s a bit like Brian Clough, retiring early from injury but coming into his own as a club manager. Or at least I hope so!”
In fact, it was his eagle-eyed mother who played a part in Jim’s new career journey: “While I was recovering, my mum saw an advert in the Daily Mail about an ‘exciting new bathroom chain’ opening in London called Simply Bathrooms. It was six shops that eventually grew into 170 stores nationwide rebranded as Bathstore.com.
“That brings me to Horsham in 2001. I opened a Bathstore.com and happily ran it until they decided to move all their production to China. So I opened a showroom over the road called & So To Bathe, selling bathroom products from ethical sources and made in Britain and Europe. And the rest is history.”
Jim’s new ethos is summed up by & So To Bathe’s new partnership with Pura Bathrooms Group, an East Sussex manufacturer with a national prestige. He says the decision to become a Pura Signature Showroom was easy: “They’re a local company with a superb cross section of products, a good after sales service, always available. We’ve worked with them for 12 years and we’ve been a big part of each other’s success in the Horsham area.”
The entire basement is given over to the very latest Pura products and inspiring bathroom suites. Jim guides me through the displays with an infectious enthusiasm; it’s clear that he lives and breathes bathrooms and takes pride in the small details. “The Flova taps are made from solid virgin brass rather than alloys, using the latest cartridge technology. We’ve had clients buy them for luxury hotels, country houses, the lot. You wouldn’t believe it for the price but they’re as good as anything out there.”
At the heart of the showroom sits a ‘display library’ of Deuco furniture packed with samples – a bathroom-lover’s paradise. “Everything here is handmade in Hertfordshire,” beams Jim. “We’ve got 25 different door and cabinet colours, 14 laminate worktops, 5 solid surface worktops, and 30-odd handle options in chrome and brushed metal finishes. I’m pretty sure it’s the widest furniture range in Sussex in a showroom of this size.”
It hasn’t always been joy and wonderment, though. “The recession in 2008 his us hard. Well, it hit everybody hard. Times were tough, but we had managed to build a really good name for ourselves which kept us going. We’d earned a lot of trust with customers due to the way we work. Tradesmen can be notorious at overcharging people, whereas we always produce a clear, concise, transparent pricing schedule for each and every product. It’s just common sense, really, doing things the right way, but sadly a lot of companies don’t subscribe to that.”
A game-changing moment came in 2012, when a conversation with a customer turned to 3D bathroom design. “He was amazed that I was still doing 2D drawings even though I had the bought the 3D software. I just couldn’t figure out how to work it. So he introduced me to Patrik, a teenager in Crawley who was a massive video game player and knew all about computers, but didn’t have a job. Patrik came in for a two week trial to try and modernise our design process, and he’s been with me ever since. He just picked it up straight away, his mastery of 3D design is just stunning. The company that makes the software [Virtual Worlds] say Patrik is one of the best designers in the country. That’s how good he is.”
Harnessing this new technology has changed the way & So To Bathe design bathrooms, with spectacular results. “It’s allowed us to become more fashion and design led. We can express our design flair a lot more because people understand it, whereas before it was always a game of “lets pretend”. Now there’s a lot of clarity in the colours, styles and textures we’re able to mix together.”
Jim shows me his showroom’s ‘4D experience’ using a giant pair of virtual goggles. Instantly I’m transported into someone’s bathroom, with a lifelike 360⁰ view of the whole space. It’s certainly a few rungs above a hand-drawn sketch on A4 paper. “The goggles hand all the power over to the customer,” says Jim. “They’re immersed in their new space and can change every last detail to their preferences, from tiles to products to orientation. Basically, it eliminates buyer’s remorse. It’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to us.”
“One of our recent customers is a director of the Best Western Plus hotel in Bramber. She was so over the moon with our work, she asked us to do all 38 rooms in the hotel. We have a crack team who go in there and turn each room around in 6 days, so she doesn’t have much downtime and loss of revenue. We’ve also started work for a timber frame house builder who build an average of 50 luxury homes a year, with plenty in Sussex. We qualify everything their clients want: 3D design, 4D service, making the installers much clearer about what the customers want.”
So where does Jim see the bathroom industry going over the next few years? “I’m quite optimistic. We’re noticing that more and more people are coming back to the bathroom specialists rather than buying online. The discerning customer wants an ‘experience’ rather than clicking a few buttons and not knowing what they’re going to end up with. We feel we’re ahead of the game on a lot of competition and we’re quietly confident that once the Brexit cards have fallen, customers will be more reassured to go ahead with that big new project. Even now, we’re as busy as we’ve ever been.”
