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Trade terms for professionals and design studios
Workshop taps were drawn by engineers: something to grip, a body built to last, nothing added for the eye. Flora starts from that vocabulary and lowers its voice. Fantini describes the collection as an industrial aesthetic interpreted with contemporary sensitivity, and the phrase is exact. Vincent Van Duysen keeps the frankness of the handle, then balances the proportions until, as the maker says, they lend the product sensuality. What arrives at the basin has the directness of a plant-room fitting, minus the roughness.
Set beside other designer taps, the basin versions show how far that balance travels. The three-hole set stands a spout between two handles; the single-hole mixer gathers everything into one fluid, discreet body; the wall-mounted set moves spout and handles off the worktop. Handles come with one, two or four “wings”, supplied as standard, and each piece is brass beneath one of five finishes: Chrome, Polished Nickel, Matt Gun Metal, Mokka or Brushed Steel Look. In an executive bathroom, where a client may wash their hands between two meetings, that restraint is the point.
The remaining pieces can be listed by the surface they are fixed to. On the wall: concealed shower mixers and thermostatic valves in a vertical line, a hand shower on its bracket, bath spouts and concealed bath mixers. On a deck or rim: the bidet mixer, bath sets in four or five holes, and the kitchen mixer with its swivel spout and separate pull-out spray. On the floor: a freestanding bath mixer. Overhead: round shower heads, on an arm or flush with the ceiling. In the garden: Flora Outdoor, a shower column in stainless steel. La Mercanti reads the drawings with the architect and lists, room by room, which Flora piece goes where.
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Five: Chrome, Polished Nickel PVD, Matt Gun Metal PVD, Mokka PVD and Brushed Steel Look PVD. Fantini notes that the finish variants involve all the elements, so basin, shower and bath can share one surface throughout a room.
Its spout projects 12.5 cm (4.9 in). The mixer is a single lever on a traditional cartridge and fits worktops up to 50 mm (2 in) thick, so the thickness of the vanity top is worth measuring before the tap hole is drilled.
Three positions. Concealed in the wall, with a spout or without one; on the rim of the bath, as a five-hole set with spout or a four-hole set without; or on the floor, as a freestanding single-lever mixer. The rim sets and the floor mixer come with their own hand shower.
You press to open and press again to close; turning the ring around the button regulates the flow. Temperature stays on the thermostatic control. The push-button stop valves are marked for overhead shower, hand shower or AUX, so each outlet has its own labelled button.
Fantini’s technical manual describes the concealed body of the shower mixers with traditional cartridge as soundproofed. It is the part that stays inside the wall, behind the plate and the handle; the manual gives the description and no rating, so soundproofed is the word to use in a specification.
A Flora order line is an article code plus a finish code, sometimes a final letter and sometimes a second code. Five steps to write it so the supplier has nothing to guess.
Each Flora piece has its own article code in Fantini’s technical manual. It identifies the object, a three-hole basin mixer or a shower arm, and says nothing yet about its colour.
Two characters name the finish: 02 for Chrome, 95 for Polished Nickel PVD, P5 for Matt Gun Metal PVD, S5 for Mokka PVD, 92 for Brushed Steel Look PVD. Write them next to the article code on every line.
On basin mixers the letter W at the end of the code means the mixer is supplied without waste. Leave it out and the waste is included. Decide once per basin, according to the waste the basin itself needs.
Wall-mounted basin sets and concealed mixers are ordered as two codes: one for the exposed part, one for the body built into the wall. An order line that carries only the first leaves the installer with nothing to connect.
The five finishes extend to wastes, bottle trap and flush plates, so the same two characters can run down the whole order. Flora Outdoor is the exception: it is offered in two finishes of its own, Black Velvet and a brushed stainless steel.
