What two German designers learned in an Estonian sauna, and what they built when they came home

The outdoor shower exists at the intersection of two problems that nobody has solved particularly well: it is either a plumbing project, which makes it expensive and disruptive and frequently value-engineered out of a landscape budget, or it is a piece of camping equipment mounted to a fence post, which is fine but not what anyone pictured when they first put it on the wish list.

Toni Egger and Felix Tarantik are German designers who travel for research the way journalists do — by going somewhere, immersing, and coming back with a specific problem to solve. Their trip through northern Europe, including time in Estonia studying sauna culture, produced two products. The first was the Saunagondel, which takes retired Swiss ski gondolas and converts them into freestanding backyard saunas. The second was a response to the thing Nordic sauna culture is equally serious about: cooling down.

The Garden Shower debuted as a pre-production model at Milan Furniture Fair and has the kind of physical logic that is immediately obvious once you see it. A single bent stainless steel tube, 205 centimetres tall, that loops at the base to create a freestanding form requiring no anchoring. It works on grass, stone, tiles, or sand. It connects to a standard garden hose. The showerhead is hidden inside the pipe — not recessed or panelled, but genuinely inside the tube, so the object reads as a continuous line of steel with water coming out of it. The flow rate is 1.35 litres per minute, calibrated to feel like rain rather than a rinse.

The two bayonet joints that allow the shower to disassemble into three sections for winter storage are machined by Dornier, the German aerospace manufacturer. They sit inside the pipe because the design philosophy of the object is that the engineering should not be visible. Using aircraft-grade components for a garden shower is not the economical choice. It is the correct choice if you have decided that the object should look like it has no connectors.

The whole thing weighs 3 kilograms. You can carry it under one arm.

For a landscape designer or architect working on a Canadian residential or hospitality project, the Garden Shower solves a specific and recurring problem: the outdoor shower that keeps making it onto the design brief but keeps getting cut during value engineering because the plumbing cost comes back too high. This product has no plumbing cost. There is no underground line, no drain, no permit, no trades beyond whoever finishes the site. It installs in an afternoon and stores in three parts when the season ends.

It is not a substitution for a built-in outdoor shower if that is what the project requires. It is the outdoor shower for every project where the built-in option was not going to survive the budget conversation