ABOUT DAVIS
I design bathrooms
I trained in architecture and industrial design and became a licensed architect in Brazil before settling in Maryland in the early nineties. For nearly forty years, bathrooms have increasingly become the focus of my work.
Today, that focus has never been clearer.
How I got here
I grew up in São Paulo, one of four children in a family of six sharing a single bathroom. At times, relatives lived with us too, and eight or nine people might depend on that one small room. There was nothing luxurious about it. The bathroom simply had to work—for many people, many bodies, many schedules and many needs.
When I was about five, my father and I were making sunbaked adobe bricks together. I grew up around a very practical kind of ingenuity: figuring out how to build things, solve problems and make things work.
But making something work was never quite enough for me. I was drawn as well to beauty, meaning, and the way a space could make me feel. Long before I had words for any of that, I was imagining places where I could slow down, feel at ease, and simply be. Architecture eventually gave me a way to bring those things together.
Learning how things work
My architectural work exposed me to different ways of thinking about people and buildings. In Geneva, I worked on residential environments for aging in place. In London, I worked in hospital design. My study of universal design and accessibility deepened my understanding of architecture in relation to the body, health and ability.
At the same time, I stayed close to how buildings are actually made. I worked in construction and became deeply involved with tile and stone—eventually working in quality control and inspection and investigating failures. Working at that level changed how I see architecture. A drawing can look beautiful and still fail. Good design has to account for what happens behind the finished surface as carefully as what we see.
These experiences changed how I see the bathroom. Beauty matters deeply, but so do the body using the room, how water moves through it, how materials meet, how it will be cleaned and maintained, and how long it will last. I learned to see the bathroom from many directions at once.
Bringing it all together
When someone tells me something can’t be done, my first question is: why not? These challenges have led me to integrate light into architectural surfaces, rethink waterproofing around windows inside showers, and eventually develop and patent a floating shower bench.
Some solutions are simple. Others require drawing, making, testing and trying again. I even have a bathroom next to my office that I use as a laboratory—a place to build something, take it apart, and try again.
The bathroom brings together nearly everything I have learned: architecture and construction, beauty and function, materials and water, light and privacy, and the body as it is today and as it may change. Nearly forty years into this work, I understand more clearly than ever why the bathroom remains at the center of my work.