Guest post by Anthony, IrishBath.ie
A few years ago, if you had told me brass would outsell chrome in our shop, I would have laughed. Chrome was what everyone bought. Brass was what your granny had, usually with a bit of green around the base.
That has changed completely. Brushed brass is now our best-selling finish and it is not close. Most of what we send out these days is heading into kitchens that have just been redone.
I run a small tap shop in Dublin, so I watch a lot of these decisions being made, usually right at the end of a renovation when the budget is gone and everyone is tired. Which is a shame, because the tap is the thing you will physically touch more than anything else in the room. Forty-odd times a day, every day, for the next ten years.
Here is what I would want to know before choosing one.
Why brass took over
It is not really about fashion, though that is part of it.
Polished chrome shows everything. Every splash, every fingerprint, every bit of limescale. You wipe it down and twenty minutes later it looks like nobody has cleaned the kitchen in a week.
A brushed finish has a fine grain to it, and that grain breaks up the light. Marks do not vanish, but they stop announcing themselves. In a hard water area, which covers a good deal of England and most of the east of Ireland, that difference is the difference between a tap you are happy with and one that quietly annoys you every morning.
Brass also warms a kitchen in a way chrome does not. If you have gone heavy on white or grey, it is often the one thing stopping the room feeling clinical.
Brushed, polished or antique?
Three finishes all get called “brass” and they behave very differently.
Polished brass is bright and mirror-like. It looks superb on day one and shows every mark by day three. Wonderful in a photograph, harder to live with.
Antique or aged brass has been deliberately darkened. It suits period kitchens and hides marks well, but it is a committed look and will not sit quietly beside flat modern units.
Brushed brass is the middle ground, and the reason the whole category took off. Warm, matte, forgiving.
One thing worth asking that almost nobody does: how the colour is applied. Cheaper taps are electroplated, which is a thin layer that can wear through at exactly the spots your hand touches. Better ones use a PVD coating, which is bonded on and considerably tougher. The difference does not show in a photograph. It shows in year three.
Pull-out, pull-down, or neither
If you have a sink you genuinely use, for rinsing pans, filling buckets, washing a muddy dog, then a tap with a spray hose will change your day more than any other upgrade in the kitchen.
But the two types are not interchangeable and people mix them up constantly. A pull-out has a spout you draw towards you, more or less horizontally. A pull-down has a taller curved spout with a head that comes straight down into the bowl. They suit different sinks and different kitchens, and getting it wrong is the sort of irritation you cannot undo without a plumber.
There is a straightforward breakdown of how pull-out and pull-down taps differ if you want the detail before you commit.
The short version: deep single bowls generally want a pull-down. Shallower bowls and double sinks usually get on better with a pull-out. And if you have a window sill or a low wall cupboard above the sink, measure your clearance before you fall in love with anything tall.
The bit everyone skips: water pressure
This is where people come unstuck, and it is the first thing I ask before taking an order.
A spray hose needs pressure behind it. If your house runs on a gravity-fed system, with a cold tank up in the attic feeding the taps, you may simply not have enough. The tap will work. The spray will dribble rather than spray, and you will spend the next five years mildly disappointed in it.
It is easy enough to check yourself. Find the tap furthest from your stopcock, hold a measuring jug under it, run it fully open for six seconds, then multiply what you have collected by ten. That gives you a rough figure in litres per minute. Under about eight, be careful with spray taps and check the minimum pressure on anything you are considering. Most manufacturers publish it. Very few buyers ever look.
If you are on mains pressure or you have a combi boiler, you are almost certainly fine.
What it costs
A good brushed brass kitchen tap with a pull-out spray sits somewhere around £80 to £160, depending on the brand and whether it is PVD coated.
Below roughly £50 you are usually looking at a thin electroplated finish over a light body, and it tends to show within a couple of years. Above about £200 you are mostly paying for a name and a longer guarantee. Worth it if you are staying put. Less so if you are doing the house up to sell.
What I would spend money on, in order: the coating, the cartridge inside (that is what decides whether the lever still feels good in five years), and the hose and counterweight on a pull-out. What I would not pay extra for: a nicer box, or a brand you recognise from advertising.
One last thing
Order the tap before the worktop goes in, not after. The hole size and the number of holes are dictated by the tap, and having a worktop drilled twice is a conversation nobody enjoys.
Thanks to Corinne for having me. If you want a look at what is about, we are at IrishBath.ie — a small independent shop in Dublin doing bathroom and kitchen taps, and not a lot else.