Behind the Illustrations of Our Christmas Collection

Long before Bath House had its familiar amber bottles, signature fragrances and stores, co-founder Nigel Brooks was drawing.

After art school, Nigel worked in illustration and children’s publishing, developing a fascination with detail, composition and visual storytelling. One commission, created around the arrival of the year 2000, involved illustrating how people had lived at the turn of the previous century, through intricate drawings of houses, interiors and the objects that filled them.

Nearly thirty years after founding Bath House, some of those early influences have unexpectedly found their way back into his work.

For Christmas 2026, Nigel and co-founder and Creative Director Abigail Brooks developed Home for Christmas, an illustrated world of winding staircases, cosy rooms, candlelight, Christmas trees, baths filled with bubbles and dressing tables scattered with perfume.

At a time when illustration is enjoying a renewed presence across fashion and luxury brands, there is something appealing about seeing the hand of the person behind an image. Pencil marks, unusual proportions and individual details bring character and authorship, a reminder that somebody imagined it, drew it and made choices along the way.

For a company that still makes its products in Cumbria, returning to drawing felt particularly appropriate. It also brings a personal touch to the bodycare gift set collections and Christmas gifts Bath House creates.

From Illustration to Bath House

When Bath House began in 1997, illustration played a much greater role in the products themselves.

“In the early days, Bath House was very focused around illustration,” Nigel explains. “We used the surfaces of bottles, soaps and packets of bath salts to create a visual language around the products, something that created a mood and atmosphere.”

Bath House was then more closely connected to the traditional gift market, with packaging regularly redesigned to introduce something new.

“Looking back, constantly changing packaging wasn’t particularly sustainable. As the business developed, we wanted the packaging to have much more long-term value and to reflect the quality of the natural ingredient skincare inside.”

The brand gradually became quieter and more recognisable. Whites and neutrals, brown paper and amber glass created an understated, almost apothecary-like aesthetic, allowing the ingredients, fragrance and product information to take greater prominence.

Illustration largely moved away from the products themselves, finding a home instead in shop graphics, windows and occasional campaigns.

Christmas, however, presented an opportunity to do something different, bringing illustration back into the bodycare gift set collection and festive packaging.

Building a Bath House Christmas

The idea for Home for Christmas developed through conversations between Abigail and Nigel about creating something unmistakably festive while still having a connection to Bath House.

“The idea of a house seemed a natural starting point,” Nigel says. “The house image has been used in many different ways at Christmas, from townhouses to department stores, but we wanted ours to feel much more homely and personal.”

The result isn’t a real house. It is an imagined one - slightly higgledy-piggledy, filled with rooms and small domestic details, with perhaps a little influence from their own home and from Nigel’s earlier work illustrating historical interiors.

Baths overflow with bubbles, candles glow, fairy lights twinkle, Christmas trees are dressed and perfume bottles gather on dressing tables. Look carefully and a cat has made itself comfortable amongst it all.

“I didn’t worry too much about scale. It isn’t meant to be an architectural drawing. It’s our own slightly quirky Bath House Christmas world.”

The collection brings this illustrated world to life across a range of festive gifts, from fragrance and bathing treats to a bodycare gift sets designed to make everyday routines feel a little more special.

A Room for Every Gift

The products themselves helped shape the rooms.

A fragrance gift naturally suggested a dressing table; body and bathing collections led to bathrooms and bathtubs. Throughout the house, Bath House products appear where you might actually use them, perfume on a dressing table, hand wash beside a basin, body oil after a bath or a candle burning in a sitting room.

“We wanted the illustrations to represent what was inside each box and its place within the home,” Nigel explains. “Bath House products are part of those everyday moments.”

Whether choosing a bodycare gift set, or a fragrance, the idea is to make the gift feel considered before it has even been opened.

For someone who has always worked with pencil, paper and sketchbooks, Nigel changed his process for this project, drawing much of the collection on an iPad.

“I enjoyed the flexibility. I could build up layers, remove something, move it or add another detail without having to start the whole drawing again.”

The finished illustration retains the character of drawing rather than striving for perfect geometry, something that gives the collection its distinctly personal quality.

25 Little Pieces of the House

Nowhere is that more apparent than in this year’s ‘Home for Christmas’ Advent Calendar.

Behind it are 25 individually designed boxes, each illustrated on every side and waiting to be discovered throughout December. Together they become part of the larger Christmas story; individually, each contains its own surprise.

The Advent Calendar combines the excitement of a daily discovery with the pleasure of unwrapping something beautifully presented. Each box contributes to the wider illustrated world, making the calendar part of the experience rather than simply a way to count down to Christmas.

That sense of discovery continues across the Christmas gift collection, individual products, shopping bags and, eventually, the windows of Bath House’s seven shops.

“An illustrated box adds another dimension to a gift,” says Nigel. “I like the idea of giving something made in the Lake District that also has this quirky, personal connection. The packaging becomes part of the pleasure of receiving it.”

The Christmas collection deliberately steps sideways from the restrained visual language Bath House uses for the rest of the year.

“Christmas is a short period, so we can have some fun with it. Once you’ve worked through lots of ideas and finally have that light-bulb moment, it’s exciting to see it travel through everything, gifts, windows, photography and film.”

Home, at Christmas

For Nigel and Abigail, the idea ultimately comes back to what happens inside a home at this particular time of year.

There is the preparation and decoration, but also the quieter moments: bathing, cooking, listening to music, watching television, talking around the table, spending time with family and friends  or simply sitting with the cat.

It is this mixture of occasion and ordinary life that Home for Christmas tries to capture.

Next year Bath House will celebrate its 30th anniversary. After almost three decades of designing, making and continually evolving the brand, there is a pleasing circularity in returning to something that was there at the very beginning: illustration.

The collection also celebrates the craftsmanship behind Bath House products, from carefully developed fragrances to British made perfume and thoughtful gift packaging, bringing together the brand’s heritage and its creative future.

“When someone receives one of these gifts, I’d like them to feel excited before they’ve even opened it,” Nigel says. “That somebody has gone to the trouble of finding something original and special for them.

“And if somebody is walking down the high street and our Christmas window makes them turn their head, then we’ve done our job well.”

Welcome to Home for Christmas.