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Of all the things you’d consider embellishing in your bathroom, the toilet comes last. The very reason for the room is what’s most embarrassing about it. Tradition dictates that we keep the toilet porcelain, white, full stop. Even American culture’s misguided attempt at welcoming the object through a decades-long foray into plush toilet covers elicits reflective disgust. Bathroom renos usually call for a change in tile, swapping the showerhead, upgrading the hardware, but rarely a toilet upgrade beyond a Toto.
Yet for those of us with the aesthetic parasite—the sickly desperation for all things to be beautiful—I’ve come upon the maximalist, beautified answer: the Talavera toilet. My editor Lori and I have been eyeing the sparse market for fabulous toilets since March, but found none so ornate as these Mexican-style pieces. The toilets are entirely coated in hand-painted adornments, and I mean entirely—even down inside the tank. The designs feel simultaneously Mediterranean and Mexican, like a super-sized souvenir, in vibrant blues, earthy browns, and bursting florals that bridge folk art motifs with Florentine-inspired patterns.
The sourcing proved particular. I pored over the internet’s available Talavera toilets and found one Etsy seller dominates the field: Salvador, who runs CasaCastilloArt out of Guanajuato, Mexico. The shop has thousands of sales and admirers, 252 toilets at the time of writing and 3,000 more Talavera pieces besides including sinks, floor tiles, murals, and mirrors—everything you need to outfit a bathroom in head-to-toe Talavera.
This style of majolica (where colorful designs are painted onto a white background) that appear on the aforementioned toilets, derives its name from Talavera de la Reina, the Spanish capital of majolica for centuries t. Spanish immigrants brought the technique to Puebla, but the blue-and-white palette most associated with the form didn’t come from Spain at all. It came directly to Puebla via trading ships carrying Chinese porcelain across the Pacific into what was then “New Spain.” Pueblan potters, already working in the Spanish majolica tradition, reinterpreted what those ships were carrying and made it their own.
One unexpected believer in the ornamented toilet is supermodel Cara Delevingne. Architect Nicolo Bini mind-melded with Delevingne to decorate her jungle-clad Los Angeles home, which we called, in 2021, “Saint-Tropez meets Coney Island meets Cotswolds cottage meets Monte Carlo meets butch leather bar.” Beneath banana leaf wallpaper stands a proud Talavera toilet, sourced from who else but Casa Castillo.
Where other humble domestic objects—the dish brush, the soap dispenser, the hamper—have evolved into more stylish iterations with time, the toilet has remained untouched, resolutely white and clinical. Bringing Talavera to it is a reclassification from biological necessity to decorative object.
One somewhat contentious Reddit thread weighs the conundrum: Need I do my business in a work of art? To which I’d contend: Why on earth is a toilet where we draw the line?
