Bread & Butter 2026 – All photos are by ©Bread & Butter.

Design. Bread and butter always make a simple, comforting, perfect pair. From here, the Bread & Butter exhibition has built its name on. For this year’s edition at 3daysofdesign, the design platform and showcase gathered sixteen designers spanning generations and cultural backgrounds, each asked to consider how pairing shows up in the rituals of bathing. As curators Hee Choi, Myung Nyun Kim and Pyeori Jung told Archipanic, “More than a hygienic act, bathing rinses off fatigue, clears the mind, and creates space to carry on with the day.”

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Yet, bathing is not necessarily an intimate routine. “From Danish harbour bathing to Finnish Sauna, Korean jjimjilbangs and Japanese onsens, we move quietly along the boundary between self and others,” the curators added. With that in mind, every Bread & Butter designer worked to a tight brief: a pair of objects, each fitting within a 40x40x40 centimetre cube.

Photo by Noura.

Korean designer Hun Lee took his cue from a rainy-day ritual — tea after a bath. His response was a teapot and cups in glazed blue ceramic, set alongside trays of rolled orange clay whose soft, irregular forms echo raindrops gathering on a surface.

Hun Lee’s tea set.

Ask a Finn about bathing, and the sauna isn’t far behind. Rasmus Palmgren‘s Kiulu Stool and Soap Tray leaned on the same traditional joinery: as the wood absorbs water, it swells and tightens against the ring holding the structure together. Structurally and ritually, the pair only reinforces itself the more it’s used.

Rasmus Palmgren’s design.

London-based designer John Tree looked further back, to childhood. “When I was a child, my parents would sit on an old milking stool and wash me in the bath using a bucket,” he recalled. His 3D-printed plastic stool doubles as the bucket itself — a pair of objects collapsed into one piece, carrying two functions instead of two forms.

John Tree’s design.

From Copenhagen, Maria Bruun‘s Tearful Waters took a similar tenderness and turned it toward parenthood. A pitcher serves as the vessel, a washcloth as the tool. “The pair belongs to the sometimes quiet, sometimes challenging rituals of bathing my children and washing their hair — gestures of conversation and soothing self-care, repeated daily and weekly over time,” she says.

Maria Bruun’s design.

Water itself took centre stage in Shizuka Tatsuno‘s piece. “Bathing begins with water,” the Japanese designer shared, and her glass vessel — paired with local water — treated it as more than something functional, but as a thing to observe, experience and rediscover. Light and air drew out subtle movements within the glass: reflections, ripples and shifting tones that spill gently into the surrounding space.

Shizuka Tatsuno’s design.

Seoul-based Studio Large Medium Small rounded things off with metal bowls nodding to Korean saunas, where eating is as much a part of the visit as washing. The same vessels can pour water or hold a snack like a handful of boiled eggs.

Studio Large Medium Small’s design.

Across teapots, stools, pitchers, soap trays and snack bowls, Bread & Butter 2026 proved that pairing isn’t a gimmick but a genuine way of thinking. One brief, countless quiet rituals: simple ingredients, properly combined, still make for the best results.

Bread & Butter 2026.

All photos are ©Bread & Butter.

Bread & Butter 2026 – Photo by Noura, ©Bread & Butter.