Behind the Glaze: Our Visit to Catalano in Italy
Behind the Glaze: Our Visit to Catalano in Italy We travelled to Catalano in Italy to see how some of the world’s finest ceramic bathroom
We travelled to Catalano in Italy to see how some of the world’s finest ceramic bathroom pieces are made.
There is a difference between knowing a product and standing in the place it is made. We travelled to Fabrica di Roma to see Catalano at the source.
Catalano has been making ceramic bathroom pieces since 1967, from one site in Fabrica di Roma, an hour north of the capital, at the centre of a ceramic-making region that reaches back centuries. Kallums Bathrooms has worked with the brand for years, and this time we went to see the factory floor for ourselves. There is no second site. Everything Catalano sells is designed, cast, glazed and fired in that one place.
Nothing here is outsourced. The clay is worked in-house, the glazes are mixed on site and the “Made in Italy” mark is stamped into every piece so its origin cannot be undone.
We spent two days with Catalano. The first was given over to the people behind the brand, with a guided tour of Palazzo Farnese, the Renaissance residence at the heart of the region. We enjoyed the Italian air, the company and the conversation so much that dinner ran long into the evening. It is a reminder that Catalano makes its ceramic in a part of Italy where beautiful things have been made for centuries.
That kind of access matters. It means that when we choose a Catalano piece for your bathroom, we are not working from a brochure. We know the people, the process and the standard they hold themselves to. The second day belonged entirely to the factory.
The scale of the production is the first thing that lands. Most of the manufacturing is carried out by advanced machinery, working with remarkable precision and consistency. The kiln, where each piece is fired, is enormous. But the machines are only as good as the people directing them and that is where Catalano separates itself.
The laboratory is what stayed with us. Catalano tests the quality of its clay on site, continuously and researches new raw materials from around the world to see whether they can improve the strength and performance of the ceramic. Someone decides which clay is good enough. Someone judges the result. Close to sixty years of that knowledge sits behind every piece and as we found earlier this year at the MRF workshops in France, there is no substitute for seeing that work with your own eyes.
The finishes are where it all shows. We were shown the metallic range in copper, bronze and graphite, each one a solid depth of colour that shifts as you move around it. These are not finishes sitting on top of the ceramic. The colour is fired into it, which is why it will look the same in twenty years as it does on the stand today. The cream and off-white matt bowls we kept returning to, carry the same quality, a softness to the surface that a photograph never quite holds.
Catalano is often filed under minimalist and the room-sets prove how much range sits inside that word. A sage-green cloakroom with a single blush bowl and a backlit round mirror felt calm and quiet. A few steps away, a black square basin sat against a wall of dramatic figured wood, sharp and confident in a way that would anchor a whole scheme.
What connects them is restraint. The ceramic is always the loudest thing in the room and everything around it is chosen to let that read. It is the same instinct we bring to our own case studies, where the material does the talking and the styling stays out of its way.
Choosing a basin from a screen is easy. Understanding why one basin costs what it costs and why it will still look beautiful long after a lesser version has crazed and stained is harder. Visiting Catalano answered that in the most direct way possible: by showing us the clay, the craftsmanship, the testing, the kilns and the people behind every stage of the process.
When you specify a Catalano piece through Kallums Bathrooms, whether at our Putney showroom in South West London or our Guildford showroom in Surrey, you are choosing ceramic that has been made properly, in one place, by a company that has done nothing else since 1967. That is the difference between a bathroom that is finished and one that lasts.
To see the Catalano collections in person or to talk through how they might work in your project, visit one of our showrooms or speak with our team.
For more examples of how our bathroom design pieces are being used in real-world projects, explore our case studies.
Behind the Glaze: Our Visit to Catalano in Italy We travelled to Catalano in Italy to see how some of the world’s finest ceramic bathroom
WOW!house 2026: What We Saw and What Stayed With Us We said we would be going. We went. WOW!house 2026 at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour
The Cloakroom That Proves Small Spaces Can Be Extraordinary Why some of the smallest rooms in a home often leave the biggest impression When people
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