The plastic bottles in your recycling bin have a surprisingly glamorous potential future. Roca’s Stonex material comes from recycled PET resin, and the expanded Ohtake collection is probably the most design-forward version of that material the brand has produced yet. The new bathtub is compact, inspired by Japanese Ofuro soaking culture, and built in Stonex that is warm to the touch and resistant to the kind of wear and discoloration that makes bathroom surfaces look rough after a few years. From recycling bin to Red Dot winner. That’s a reasonable arc.
Rodrigo Ohtake designed the expansion, pulling forward a collection his father, the legendary Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake, built with Roca. The two new basins came out of hand-sculpted clay models, which explains why they carry the shape of a calla lily rather than the usual flat-plane geometry bathroom design defaults to when nobody’s paying close attention. The bathtub accessories, a side shelf and an entry step that pulls double duty as a stool, arrive in soy resin. Roca built the whole expansion around the idea that sustainable material choices and strong design can be the same choice, resolved at the same time. Looking at the finished pieces, that idea lands.
Designer: Rodrigo Ohtake for Roca
The two basins cover different ground despite sharing the same botanical reference. One reads as a shallow, elongated vessel, almost like a leaf mid-curl, with edges that lift just enough to feel deliberate. The other is deeper and rounder, with walls that rise more confidently from the counter surface. Both began as physical clay models rather than digital geometry, which is where those specific curves came from, and both land in a finish range that goes well past the usual white-and-off-white defaults: matt black, onyx, coffee, beige, and a terracotta that is available in Brazil and on request everywhere else. That terracotta option is the one worth tracking down.
The Stonex bathtub is where the Ofuro influence lands most visibly. Ofuro baths are traditionally compact and steep-sided, built for soaking upright in hot water rather than reclining across the full length of a Western tub, and the whole point is immersion rather than rinsing. Rodrigo’s version holds that compact discipline and adds an integrated seat that makes the cocoon feeling more literal. The soy resin step and shelf arrive as standard, so the full ritual setup is sorted from the start. Stonex retains ambient heat on contact rather than pulling it away, which is a material detail that matters considerably more than it sounds.
Rodrigo took over the studio his father founded after Ruy Ohtake died in 2021, and the two practices formally merged into OHTAKE in 2022. Ruy built over 420 projects in Brazil across five decades, with a design philosophy that ran consistently on organic forms and curves drawn from the natural world. Rodrigo’s grandmother, Tomie Ohtake, was a celebrated Japanese-Brazilian abstract artist whose visual instincts filtered into the family’s work long before any of this became a bathroom collection. That three-generation lineage between Japanese heritage, Brazilian modernism, and contemporary sustainable design practice sits quietly behind every decision in this expansion. Rodrigo has said he tries to look to the future rather than the past, which is probably the right instinct when the past is that substantial.
The full collection is available through Roca globally, with basin finishes running from matt black and onyx to coffee, beige, and white. The iF Design Award and Red Dot both went to the new basin and bathtub in 2025, alongside Best in Show at Expo Revestir in Brazil. Those are the right awards for this kind of work: they measure execution as much as intent. For a collection that started on a workbench with clay and ended up in recycled resin and soy, the pieces carry almost none of the burden of either that origin story or the family legacy behind them. They just look like they belong.
The post Roca’s New Bathtub and Basin Turn Recycled PET Bottles Into Sculptural Bathroom Design first appeared on Yanko Design.
