Where's the value in an innovation no one can clean?

This is the new Polhedra series from Franke.

They sure are interesting but how does one clean a sink with a faceted bottom? Seriously. I'm all about innovation and new ways to approach old problems, but this strikes me as something that causes problems that didn't exist before.

Trendir tells me that I can read all about it on Franke's website but I can't find a mention of it. Again, where's the value in this innovation?

A new idea in sinks from Blanco

That is a drop-in sink not a flush-mount. It's Blanco's new MicroEdge™ sink and it just won an honorable mention in KB+B's Product Innovator Awards for 2009. Blanco's MicroEdge™ was one of nine products named as a stand out for the year.

Since the advent of undermount sinks ten years ago, nobody's really done anything with drop-in sinks. That was until Blanco took another look at them and decided that the traditional drop-in kitchen sink needed a face lift. So Blanco developed a 1.25mm thick sink rim and called it MicroEdge™.

Drop-ins are usually less expensive to deal with and if you're replacing an existing sink, you options have always been limited to the traditional 17- to 18-gauge stainless steel the rest of the sink was made of. Blanco found a way to make the transition from an 18-gauge stainless bowl to a 1.25mm rim. Pretty slick!

Go to Blanco's website to see their complete collection.


In other departments, Blanco started a company blog recently and it's called Blanco by Design. On it you can find last minute updates on Blanco products as well as items of interest to the kitchen and bath world. To quote from their new site:

BLANCObydesign.com provides a forum for homeowners, kitchen and bath design profesionals, BLANCO representatives and showroom sales associates to exchange information. Here you’ll discover the latest product news, program introductions, support tools, sources of inspiration, design ideas and more.

BLANCObydesign.com will also create a channel to lend your voice to the BLANCO community. Just hit the Comments link to share new ideas, or anything that’s on your mind. Your contributions are the key to making this blog successful for all.

The center tab on Blanco by Design's page is something called the Blanco Design Council. Blanco's Design Council is intended to be a group of professionals who've been brought on board to lend a hand and an ear to Blanco's new undertaking. At the top of that list you'll find yours truly.

So bravo to Blanco on the recognition awarded to MicroEdge™ and three cheers for wading into the world of Social Media.

Reader question: What color appliances go with a copper sink?

Help! I read your blog all the time but I never wrote to you before. I like that you tell people what's on your mind. I can take it. My partner and I are building a new home and we would LOVE to have a copper sink. What I can't figure out is what color of appliances I should get to coordinate. The cabinets will have a darker maple finish. Please advise.

Well good, I'm glad you been on this site before and I'll do what I can. The easy answer to your question is that you should get the color appliances you like. There's no rule that says metal finishes have to match. In fact I say they look better when they don't.

Everybody you talk to will have a different take on this, but you wrote to me and here's what I say. Working a copper sink into a kitchen design involves more than appliance colors. Don't get me wrong; a well-made copper sink is a lovely, lovely thing. It's just that they're not very subtle --they are a scene stealer so it's best to let it be the focal point of your kitchen.

It sounds like you haven't selected the actual sink yet, so look for an apron front sink like the ones I'm picturing along with this post. Get a natural-looking patina on the sink you buy. There are all sorts of wild patinas you can get on a copper sink, but go basic and classic. Get stainless appliances, stainless steel is a classical finish in a kitchen and it's also a neutral. In going with stainless appliances, you now have two metal finishes in this kitchen, so keep going. Find a third and use it for your fixtures. Most manufacturers' oil-rubbed bronze finishes have a lot of copper color in them, so an oil-rubbed bronze faucet will work perfectly.

When you go to look at knobs and handles you'll now have three metal finishes to choose from, but hardware that comes close to the oil-rubbed bronze finish of the faucet will be the easiest to find. That doesn't mean that you can't use the color of the steel or the color of the copper when it comes time to picking hardware. What's important is that what you're doing make some kind of sense, it should tell a coherent story.

Long story short? Let your copper sink have center stage and get stainless appliances.

Revisiting the sink revolution

Last week, I wrote a quick piece about about the Affluence seamless sink. Within hours of that post's going live, I received a very thoughtful e-mail from Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan is the inventor of the seamless sink and he's also the CEO of Affluence, the company who brought the seamless sink to market.

Dan gave me his phone number and asked me to call him, so I did. What followed was an hour-long conversation with a man whose passion for his invention is contagious, let me tell you. What an inspiring story and what a great human being. Dan walked me through Affluence's website and we reviewed everything, sink by sink.

When I wrote about the Affluence originally, all I saw was the streamlined look of a seamless sink. Granted, it's an impressive feature, but it's only a third of the story.

All disposers have a clunky black stopper. In a double bowl sink, which is what most people have, there's a strainer basket on the sink side and stopper on the disposer side. Because that's the way thing just are, no one thinks that they don't coordinate. At least I never did. But in an Affluence sink, the strainer and the stopper are identical. They're identical because the drain opening and the disposer opening are the same size. Brilliant! It makes the already improved appearance look even better.

See what I mean? Now go look at your sink. If you have a double bowl set-up, take a look at how bad your stopper looks. Awful, isn't it? As I'm showing here, there's help available.

The final third of the story is how the Affluence seamless sink re-thought the act of disposer installation. Plumbers hate installing disposers. It's a labor-intensive exercise that invariably ends in bleeding knuckles. But watch this video as Dan himself installs a disposer on an Affluence sink.

All of the parts for this installation come with the sink too, so there's nothing extra to buy. Again, brilliant!

I understand completely why the Affluence Seamless Sink won the Best of Competition Award at KBIS this year. And Dan, you made a believer out of me.

It's a sink revolution

Many thanks to my pal Laurie Burke from Kitchen Design Notes for this one.

Ordinary sinks have a seam where the plumber's ring meets the bottom of the sink. Since virtually all sinks look like this, no one really notices the seams.

That was until now. Check out these seamless, stainless steel sinks from Affluence. Somebody looked down into his or her sink and said "There has to be a better way." And sure enough, there is. Wow. What a difference!

Overstock.com --who knew?

When I posted the photos of my marble counter the other day, I heard a lot of questions and comments about the faucet and the sink that went into that kitchen. Originally, I had specified the Kohler Vinnata faucet and a Houzer flat-bottom sink.

Here's the Vinnata from Kohler in another project from last year. The Vinnata is a beautiful fixture and it retails for around $700. That's honed Calacatta marble on that counter in case you're wondering.

This is the back end of a Kohler Verity apron-front sink in this photo, and it's also a great sink, but that's a topic for another day.

So anyhow, despite my explicit instructions, my client went off on her own and found some less-expensive substitutes. Good for her I say, she picked out some good stuff. She must have a good coach. Hah! When the sink and faucet showed up she was pretty proud of her selections but a little cagey about where she got them. Eventually, I pried the source out of her. It turns out that this client, who's become the current holder of my Best Client Ever title, found her fixtures on Overstock.com.

I mean, who knew? I'm a pretty Internet-savvy guy and I had no idea that Overstock.com sold plumbing fixtures. Well, they do and they sell all kinds of other home-related things too.

So in the kitchen featured in Monday's More Marvelous Marble, here's the faucet.

And here's the sink she bought.

I don't get too attached to my plumbing recommendations and I love saving a buck as much as the next guy. So if you're in a bind and you're looking to save some money on an upcoming renovation, Overstock.com might be a good place to check. But be careful, their offerings are kind of hit or miss from a quality standpoint. But hey, times is hard.

Trend watch: new faucet shapes

KBIS (http://www.kbis.com/), the national Kitchen and Bath Industry Show is right around the corner. Manufacturers and suppliers use the yearly KBIS to roll out new products and in the weeks leading up to it, those same companies offer previews to the industry. My preview from Kohler (http://www.kohler.com/) arrived yesterday, and they have some pretty cool new stuff. Kohler's march toward the higher end of the market continues in their new products, that's for sure.

KWC (http://www.kwcamerica.com/) , a high end plumbing fixture company from Switzerland, makes a faucet they call the 1922. The 1922 is pictured above. I've always thought the 1922 was a beautiful, elegant sink fixture. Kohler's new HiRise suite of faucets seems to have taken KWC's idea of the 1922 and expanded it into a whole suite of fixtures.

The HiRise series has a deck mount faucet, a wall mount faucet, a single pole faucet, a pot filler and a sprayer. The tall, arcing shape of the faucet is continuing the trend of the last couple of years for kitchen faucets to get taller and taller. What's different though is that it has no integrated sprayer. I think it's an interesting direction and the HiRise is really gorgeous. As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely another step in the direction of the higher end of the market. The retail price on these things starts at a thousand dollars. That makes it a more expensive fixture than KWC's 1922, and I always think of KWC as an unabashedly high end brand. From the looks of Kohler's preview, I guess I need to readjust my thinking about Kohler as a company in the middle.