TAPPING INTO NEW FAUCETS AND SINKS
It’s not surprising that all things rustic have been dominating design trends for the past few years. For Canadians, it’s a convenient way to appreciate the great outdoors, without actually having to go outdoors.
“It’s all about bringing the exteriors in,” said Victoria Montbriand, co-owner (with Anne Hébert) of BAB Distribution, which specializes in bathrooms, kitchens, flooring, tiles, and countertops.
“Houses are getting more windows for better views of outside. Stone surfaces are big. People are putting up concrete on walls, or buying big tables that look like trees. Anything that’s an exterior element is being brought inside.”
Which, no doubt, is why BAB’s unique handcarved stone sinks are so popular.
To create their signature pieces, BAB deals with local and regional quarries that produce distinct stones. The St-Marc is a greyish-white fossil stone; the Champlain is a rich, dark rock with embedded white flecks; the Indiana Buff is a champagne-hued limestone; and the streaky Emorosan almost looks like wood.
To top off these beautiful bathroom sinks, Montbriand has noticed that single-hole faucets are in demand, moving away from the three-hole model that had two knobs on each side of a central tap. But changes in sink design have also had an impact on how faucets work.
“Because sinks aren’t as deep as they used to be, the water coming out of the faucet has to have less pressure,” Montbriand explained. “Now it’s more like a flow of water, or a waterfall, rather than a jet.”
Over in the kitchen, our expectations of faucets are entirely different. Power is key, but the single-hole design still applies.
Montbriand gets constant requests for pull-down taps, an industrial-style feature that emerged from restaurant kitchens — more specifically, the dishwasher’s station. They’re efficient, malleable, and make it easy to spray off dirt or residue.
“A big trend are soap dispensers integrated into counters, next to the pull-down tap,” Montbriand said. “There should be soap dispensers in bathrooms, too, but that’s probably in future.”
Montbriand is also seeing many push-down faucets. These retractable taps are usually installed on a kitchen island, and can be pulled out of a socket when needed, then pushed back down after use. The purpose is to keep the island surface flat.
Pot-fillers are also gaining ground. These are installed next to the stovetop, and allow people to fill a pot full of water, and slide it to the nearest burner without exerting too much effort. It’s a huge leap from hauling heavy pots from the sink to the stovetop.
As for those kitchen sinks, people still prefer having two of them, but they’re also asking for rounded corners, to avoid getting food bits stuck in the crevices of angular square sinks.
The whole setup is also getting
prettier, because faucet and sink companies are recruiting designers from different disciplines. Italian architect Antonio Citterio, for one, is on board at Axor to design faucets, which BAB distributes.
“Designers are branching out,” Montbriand said. “The industrial look was seen in many kitchens for a while, but designers have refined that esthetic, like they did for the pull-down faucet.”
What’s not going out of style are stone counters. On that front, Montbriand is all about the concrete. It’s made great strides in recent years, to the point where it could even be used as kitchen sink material.
“Concrete is porous,” Montbriand said. “There are finishes that are stronger, so you won’t get a soap ring or water deposits. But with a counter, where you’re working with lemon or products that can eat into the finish like oil, there could be stains. Still, that’s what I wanted to live with to have something that was out of the ordinary.
“It depends on how far out of the box people want to go.”
Designers are branching out. ... (They) have refined that (industrial) esthetic, like they did for the pull-down faucet. VICTORIA MONTBRIAND