Skip to content Skip to content
About Us
We are a family-run business established in 1980 specialising in providing bathroom ware in discontinued colours and styles from all the major UK & European brands. From the Group 1 colours including Sky Blue, Coral Pink, Turquoise and of course Avocado through to 80s & 90s shades such as Champagne, Indian Ivory & Whisper Peach right up to modern White ware. Suppliers to public & trade for replacement items and new installations. Altogether we have well over a hundred different shades of sanitaryware in stock, including two-tone, matt, mother-of-pearl and other unusual finishes.
Although our main priority is the supply of replacement sanitaryware to match existing domestic and commercial installations originally fitted some years ago, we regularly provide items for new installations in retro styles and colours. We also supply period bathroom items as set props for film, television and theatre.
With a small but dedicated team of sales, warehouse and logistics staff having between us a combined experience of over 50 years in the bathroom business, there isn’t much we don’t know about British sanitaryware; every make, range, colour and style of bathroom equipment is stored in our own portable databases (our brains that is) for instant access at all times – just give us a call on 01428 608164 to put us to the test!
Introducing the Brokenbog Team:
General Manager Sam Powell has been in the bathroom trade pretty much since birth, in fact being the third generation of the Powell family to deal in coloured bathroomware; his Grandfather founded a business in the south Wales valleys in the 1960s selling bathroom suites (among many other things) when the colours were originally in fashion, passing the mantle on to Sam’s father Eddie who founded Miscellanea of Churt in 1980 (now one of the UK’s most exclusive and unique interiors showrooms, see www.miscellanea.co.uk for details). The Miscellanea warehouses were stocked with discontinued lines from all the main UK manufacturers during the 80s and 90s, with Sam and a few assistants having a large part to play in the stacking and organising of some 50,000 items of coloured sanitaryware.
With an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much every colour, style, size and type of bathroom item made over the last 40 years or so, Sam is able to identify most styles of WC, washbasin or bidet at a hundred paces although as he says “most weeks we come across something I’ve never seen before; the variety of colours, styles and configurations made over the years is mind-boggling but I think I’m just about getting to grips with them now after 30 years’ practice.”
Julie keeps the office in check; from receiving email and telephone enquiries, locating the correct items in the warehouse, making sure all of the day’s deliveries are correctly despatched to the right places across the UK, sending colour samples in the post to make 100% sure that each customer is ordering the right colour for their purposes, to planting and maintaining our year-round floral displays which brighten up the workplace even more than the coloured toilets do!
“I love being in the fresh air – it’s certainly not your average office job here, and being surrounded by all the colours; I never knew there so many different shades until starting here 5 years ago. I particularly enjoy when we can find an exact match for a customer’s item, which they’ve often been searching for for years. It’s a joy to be able to come up with solutions to problems that people thought could never be solved.”
Floyd is our main warehouse and logistics manager, in charge of making sure the goods we supply are checked thoroughly, the correct fittings supplied and most importantly they are delivered safely in one piece. With a vast knowledge built up over some 15 years in the discontinued bathroom trade, both here and previously at a fellow dealer, there is almost nothing he doesn’t know when it comes to British-made bathroomware and, not being one to mince words, he can often be heard politely correcting those who think they know what they’re talking about!
“The most foolish man you’ll ever meet is the man who thinks he knows everything; even after having been in this trade as long as I have there’s always something new to learn. It’s addictive; I always find myself identifying bathroom styles when I’m out and about and even on the telly – from Del Boy Trotter’s Twyfords Nocturne in Platinum Grey to Alan Partidge’s Ideal Standard Accent suite (or as he calls it, the “Buck Rogers” toilet), not to mention the numerous bathroom sets we’ve supplied for television programmes such as Eastenders and films including Paddington, The Avengers and many more.”
One thing we can’t be accused of is being a “conventional” kind of bathroom business – with the warehouses being a former nurseries site we’ve created a most unusual business model over the thirty years or so on this site, as the videos below should serve to illustrate:
Welcome to the Brokenbog world
The short video below gives a basic introduction to the warehouse and the service we provide:
Here’s some EPIC aerial footage of the warehouse to give you an idea of the quantity of discontinued bathroom stocks we carry:
And if that wasn’t enough, with winter fast approaching here’s how we pass the time in the colder months of the year: