Victor Carrasco’s voluminous washbasin for manufacturer Boffi—appropriately designated VOL—is one part industrial functionality and two parts contemporary elegance. If, that is, your design parlance equates the latter with simple clean lines and smooth contoured edges. Slated for distribution beginning January 2010 in the UK, VOL debuted last April at Milan’s Salone di Mobile, where it won high praise for its “peculiar, sculptural shapes and proportions,” and no small quantity of admiring attendees who rhapsodized romantic about the ablutional prospects of such a spacious basin.

VOL washbasin. Designed by Victor Carrasco for Boffi.

Carrasco is yet young but known internationally for his signature style and fondness for unconventional proportions. He’s also much admired for his business savvy and trend-spotting: as founder of Spanish manufacturer Viccarbe, Carrasco has achieved collaborations with none other than Patricia Urquiola, Jean Marie-Massaud, and Arik Levy, in addition to garnering sufficient industry interest and peer admiration to win the prestigious Principe Felipe award in 2008.

Though VOL is technically Carrasco’s first collection, one glance at the unique monoblock construction and unorthodox profile belies this bit of trivia. Indeed, the piece has the functional appeal and distinctive aesthetic of an old pro (perhaps his affiliation with Urquiola, et al., is relevant here). VOL is available in wall-mounted and free-standing models, both of which offer a choice of spigots (wall-mounted “wing” taps by colleague Mario Tessarollo or a slightly more conventional basin-top faucet). While both incarnations are tempting, as a confirmed logo-phile, I’m partial to the slightly off-kilter base of the floor model, which resembles an overly-linear question mark: for what other object synthesizes a crazily skewed mark of punctuation with a bottomless basin of soapy suds? None that this chronicler has heretofore seen

via Dezeen