Showroom

Fantini

Italian bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Family owned since 1947, on Lake Orta.

Fantini makes taps and shower fittings in Italy, and its New York showroom is on the eighth floor of the Architects and Designers Building at 150 East 58th Street, which is the floor above Gaggenau and in the same stack of kitchen and bath showrooms. A morning in that building covers the fittings and the appliances on one trip.

Piero Lissoni designed the room, and he designed it to disappear. White throughout, walls backlit from behind, crystal shelving and display cases, a long trestle table with the shower systems set out in line. There is no styling to read past, which on a fittings floor is the whole point, because a tap seen against a scene is being sold and a tap seen against a white shelf is being specified.

The collections are shown as ranges rather than as single pieces, and a large part of the floor is given to Aboutwater, the line Fantini makes with Boffi. That is where Naoto Fukasawa, Piero Lissoni, Paik Sun Kim and Michael Anastassiades sit, and it is the section that will not be seen assembled anywhere else in the city.

The Architects and Designers Building is open to the public on weekdays and so is this showroom. No appointment and no account is needed to reach the eighth floor. Book anyway when a client is coming, because the shower systems need somebody to run them.

Fantini's are specified across a whole bathroom, so a basin mixer, a bath filler and a shower set have to match across three different castings and three different volumes of metal, and the same finish code reads differently on each. Lay the three out together on the trestle before the schedule is issued.