The Challenge Interior Designers face when trying to co-ordinate Glass Shower hardware finishes in a bathroom

Why the Glass Shower is where it all comes apart.

As an interior designer, you have spent days, weeks and often months perfecting the perfect bathroom, shower room or en-suite for you client. You have signed off on the tiling, the taps, towel rails, the flooring is perfect, you have narrowed down the paint colour from 1000’s of off whites, it all looks perfect. And then as a final fix, the glass shower is installed.

Whilst nothing jumps out immediately, something just isn’t quite right. The finish on the hinges, is just a little too warm and doesn’t quite match the taps. The glass has a slightly green tint to it which colours the tiling when viewed through the shower screen.

The clear silicone isn’t quite as crystal clear as you had hoped.

Except a glass shower screen is a shower screen right? Glass is glass, it’s see through and you paid extra for the easy clean coating so it stays limescale free….

With a little extra time taken on this element, the help of a specialist glass shower manufacturer, samples, hardware swatches right from the outset, most of these annoying finer detail elements could have been very different.

When is a brushed brass glass shower hinge not brushed brass?

The thing to remember here is that finish names are a good starting point, but never think that a brushed brass tap is always going to match the brushed brass hinges and handle on the glass shower.

Are the glass shower hinges and taps made from the same material?

Asking this question gives you somewhere to start and understand which process might have been used to finish the components.

• Solid brass: hot-forged or cast, then CNC-machined to final tolerances (pivot bores, glass clamp faces, screw holes).
• Stainless steel (304 or 316): usually investment-cast or machined from bar. This is more common on modern premium hardware because it’s stronger and more corrosion-resistant.
• Zinc alloy (zamak): die-cast. This is the budget option, and you’ll find it on cheaper imports.

The Brushed Texture

After machining, the parts are polished and then run in a direction agains an abrasive belt or brushing wheel. This leaves the fine parallel grain that gives the hinge the satin look. This process is prior to any colour being applied so that the colour follows the grain .

Getting the brass colour

1. PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition). This is the current standard for quality shower hardware. The brushed parts are cleaned and placed in a vacuum chamber. Metals such as titanium or zirconium are vaporised and bond to the surface as a very thin, extremely hard ceramic-metal layer. Zirconium nitride and titanium nitride give brass and gold tones. It’s usually applied over stainless steel, sometimes over solid brass. It’s highly resistant to scratching, limescale cleaners and humidity, and it won’t tarnish.
2. Solid brass, brushed and lacquered. Here the brass itself is the colour. It’s brushed, then sealed with a clear lacquer to stop it tarnishing. It looks lovely, but in a wet room the lacquer can wear or get damaged by harsh cleaners, and the brass underneath then darkens unevenly.
3. Unlacquered solid brass (“living finish”). This is brushed brass with no protection, so it deliberately patinates over time. It’s popular in high-end interiors, but you need to set clients’ expectations.
4. Electroplating. A brass or gold-tone layer is plated onto a base (often zinc or brass), then brushed and lacquered. It’s cheaper and much thinner than PVD, and it’s more prone to wearing through on edges.

What is float glass?

Glass has always traditionally been green. The easiest way to specify which glass to use is to understand how it is made. In 1951 Sir Anthony Pilkington developed the float process and it revolutionised glass making worldwide.

Glass is made of 4 main raw materials :

• Silica sand, the main component, making up around 70% of the glass
• Soda ash (sodium carbonate), which lowers the melting point
• Limestone and dolomite, which add durability and water resistance
• Cullet, which is recycled broken glass that helps the batch melt more efficiently

The green colour comes from iron oxide, a natural impurity found in the silica sand. You can see this clearly if you look at the edge of the glass. Float glass contains around 0.1% iron oxide. This green colour appears darker if you look through the edge of the glass, particularly when the glass is 10 or 12mm thickness. It also colours a white wall or tiling.

What is low iron glass?

Low-iron glass, sometimes called extra-clear or optically clear glass, is made with the same float process. What changes are the raw materials.

Manufacturers use specially sourced sand with very low natural iron content and control the other raw materials tightly to keep iron out. The result has about a tenth of the iron found in standard float glass, typically around 0.01%.

The difference shows in several ways:

• Colour. The edge appears almost colourless, with only a very faint blue-white tone.
• Clarity. Low-iron glass lets through around 91% of visible light, compared with about 88–89% for standard glass of the same thickness. Colours seen through it look truer.
• Consistency with finishes. Tiles, stone and brassware seen through the glass keep their true colour rather than taking on a green wash.

Can using frameless glass showers mitigate some of these problems?

Absolutely…. Minimising the amount of hardware and fittings on a glass shower is a great idea. It gives a contemporary look and seems to disapear particularly when using low iron glass.

This means that you only have to match the hinges and clamps if you have a fixed panel adjacent to the glass shower door. You can even avoid matching a handle as you can simply have a hold drilled in the glass, which is then polished.

The restult is a minimalist glass shower which doesn’t dominate a bathroom or en-suite but quietly compliments the rest of the decor.

When attention to detail really stands out.

This beautiful house in Virginia Water with it’s 6 bathrooms, each designed around a theme of Rose Gold required real attention to the fine detail, where even a tiny discrepancy in the colour would have jumped out at the client.

The most challenging were the LED illuminated mirrors, which each needed a frame to match the taps, shower and glass shower door hinges.

Choosing the Glass Finish

The slimline aluminium frame was cut perfectly to bespoke sizes from the same range as the glass shower door hinges. Made in the same factory in Italy, it is this attention to detail which gives the hardware and fittings in this range the deserved “premium” name.

The glass was low iron as Green edge glass and a rose gold just didn’t work. The glass gave a higher clarity than float glass, and appeared to almost disapear.

Whilst aesthetics are high on an interior designers list of priorities, so is functionality and each screen was individually made with small 3mm tolerances around the glass so that water leakage was kept to a minimum.

The result is a spa like feel to each of the bathrooms, and you won’t find a fitting or component not matching as sample sets were compared right from the start.