The Jason Wu collection for Brizo

Brizo has been collaborating with fashion designer Jason Wu since 2006 and after a five year affiliation, Brizo and Jason just announced the launch of  their long-awaited, Jason Wu-designed powder room suite, The Jason Wu for Brizo Collection. Check out this video announcing the collection.




I can't think of anybody who's selling bath fixtures quite like that. Wow.

The central motif of the collection is something Jason calls his Baroque Flower and all of the individual components feature a matte black finish (a first for Brizo) with either chrome or brushed nickel accents.

Tissue holder

Liquid soap dispenser

Soap dish

Front-mount tank lever

Side-mount tank lever

Waste basket

Drawer pull

Most notable is the faucet at the center of the collection the Jason Wu for Brizo Odin. I've been fortunate over the years to see that faucet as a number of prototypes and it's a particular thrill to see it in production. Brizo has been utilizing touch controls for the last few years, but this faucet adds a proximity sensor in addition to its touch control. A proximity sensor turns a faucet on and off any time hands come within four inches of the faucet.

They've also added a subtle LED light to the base of the faucet. That LED is a temperature indicator with red being hot, blue being cold and varying shades of magenta to indicate the various degrees of warm between the two extremes.

Here's another video where Jason and Judd Lord, the head of industrial design at Brizo discuss the collection.




The collection goes on sale this spring, but you can pre-order the components now on Brizo's website.

My article about using Twitter for businesses from Floor Covering News

Floor Covering News just published its annual social media guide and this year, they picked me to write an article about how businesses can use Twitter to their advantage.

Here's a screen capture of my article and here's the link to the whole publication. My article is on page ten.

The last few weeks have been pretty great, the trade show Coverings just hired me to be a speaker (I'll be talking about Twitter of course) at the show in April and just last week Real Simple Marketing named me the world's third most socially influential blog when it comes to the flooring industry.

I must know what I'm talking about!

Production tile as art by Apavisa

As amazed as I was by the baths I saw at Cersaie this year, it is a tile show primarily. It's just ten times the size of any tile show I've ever seen.

For the last couple of years, tile innovations have centered on improvements in printing technologies and stone-like tile continues to look more and more like natural stone with each passing model year. Still growing is the segment dedicated to making plank-shaped tile that looks very much like wood.

I knew all of that before I ever boarded a plane for Bologna and I was hoping to see something new, and I mean new in the tile world. Well I found it, the key words coming out of Cersaie were texture and shape. Of all the manufacturers' shapes and textures I saw, the manufacturer who showed off their innovations best was Spain's Apavisa. So much so that they called their very large booth an art gallery. They weren't kidding.

Do to the fact that these tiles don't lay flat, they can only be used on walls. But imagine the possibilities presented with some of these shapes and twists on traditional wall tile.

Here are some highlights from their booth in Bologna. Bear with me, there are a ton of photos to share here.

Apavisa products are distributed worldwide and can be found just about anywhere Spanish tile is sold.

Can you see yourself using some of these textures in your own home? They're onto something here and keep an eye out for other manufacturers to start playing around with shapes.

Adventures in shower pans, Italian style

At Cersaie in Bologna last September I saw all kinds of amazing innovations and new products, many of which were making their world debut in Bologna that week. Worldwide, the tile industry is more properly known as the ceramics industry, and a large component of the world ceramics industry is bath design.

Two Italian manufacturers came up with interesting ways to deal with a shower pan this year and both companies are onto what I say is the next big thing in shower design. The first of these innovations is Rapsel's Pianolegno. I'm showing it here with their Pluviae shower fixture.

By the way, Pianolegno means wooden floor in Italian and Pluviae is French for rain.

The Pianolegno is a teak grid that fits into a stainless steel shower pan that's been countersunk into the floor. The pan looks like this and can also be used on its own without the teak inserts.

Here's how it looked when I saw it at Rapsel's booth at Cersaie. It's been paired here with Rapsel's Cobra shower.

Pretty slick. Check out the rest of Rapsel's wares on their website.

Another great innovation I saw in this department is the Volo from Flaminia. Volo means flight for what it's worth.

The Volo is a ceramic, basket weave grate that sits in a ceramic pan. That pan can be countersunk into the floor or it can sit on top of the floor. If it's sitting on the floor, it's make a small step up obviously.

Here's how it looked at Faminia's booth,

and here's a detail of the grate.

Flaminia has an enormous collection of bath products and you can see them on Flaminia's website.

Granted, these two products are still kind of edgy to North American eyes, but could you ever see using something like this in your own home? Does the idea of a shower without a curb, meaning it's flush with the floor appeal to you?

Undermount sinks with laminate counters? Yes you can.

For as long as I've been part of the Kitchen and Bath Industry, I've believed the maxim that undermounting a sink with a laminate counter was impossible. But then last January I found myself the guest of Blanco at the trade show IMM in Cologne. It was at Blanco's booth that I saw this.

That is a porcelain kitchen sink that's been undermounted to a laminate counter. I'd never seen anything like it and it kind of blew my mind.

Here's a close up of the edge of that sink.

I chalked it up as just one more of those things that would never cross the Atlantic.

Then a couple of months ago at Cersaie in Bologna I saw this vanity by Duravit. Sure enough, that's another undermounted sink with a laminate counter.

Around the corner from that display was a cross section of one of these installations.

Remarkable.

Well yesterday morning I was on Twitter as I'm wont to do and I started having a conversation with the Formica Corporation (@FormicaGroup) and two designers from England, Marion John (@Majjie) and Russ Buckley (@russrb).

The topic turned to undermounting sinks with laminate counters and I showed them those photos of the Duravit displays I'd seen in Italy. Then Formica posted this photo of an undermounted stainless sink in a counter laminated in their Calacatta Marble pattern from their 180fx Series.

After ten minutes of oooohs and ahhhhs and trying to figure out how on earth you could make a waterproof seal in an installation like that, Formica pulled out this video from Karran sinks.

Mystery solved.

Now, this won't work with just any sink and the labor involved will not make this an inexpensive option. However, should you find an installer willing to do this, you can now show him or her a video that explains how to do it. Thanks Formica and thanks Karran for making this information public.