Water Works

Not long after the German faucets-and-fittings manufacturer Grohe was bought by a private-equity consortium in 2004, a media and political storm erupted. With an eye on the upcoming election, the ruling Social Democratic Party Chairman Franz Müntefering began ranting against foreign and local private-equity firms, calling them “locusts” who were ravaging firms and destroying jobs. From the design world’s perspective, the future for Grohe looked gloomy, according to Vito Oraem, managing director of the renowned Red Dot design awards, which hadn’t prominently featured the company’s products for some years. “There were skeptics who said these locusts would kill the sense of German quality, pick up the profits, kick out the workers, break up the company, and sell off the parts,” Oraem says.

In 2007, however, Grohe launched a new product that signaled an unexpected change of direction. It introduced Ondus, a collection with a strange, ribbonlike faucet—in matte-black, glossy-white, chrome, and titanium finishes—that could be operated and programmed from a touch-sensitive digital control panel and wireless unit. Whereas the old Grohe had been known for solid, midmarket, precision-engineered, long-lasting chrome faucets and spouts, the new line was unabashedly high-end. It began raking in design accolades: a Red Dot award, an iF China, and a Design Plus award. The company’s new chief designer, Paul Flowers, was selected for the “40 Under 40” list established by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. “It was shocking,” Oraem says, “that a company under this totally different ownership was able to bring innovation to the market.”

Curious to explore what brought about such a categorical leap of design faith at what is now the world’s leading manufacturer of bathroom fittings, I ventured out to Grohe’s Düsseldorf headquarters to inspect the plumbing. The company’s CEO, David J. Haines, and its design frontman, the 37-year-old Flowers, met me in the penthouse offices of a crisp, six-story Richard Meier & Partners–designed glass building. Both Haines and Flowers are British expats. Haines arrived in 2004 from Vodafone—where he helped oversee the development of a mobile Internet service and the accompanying phone and operating system—and Flowers was headhunted a year later from a position at the appliance manufacturer Electrolux.

To Haines, an imposing, blunt, media-trained businessman, the key to design management is to find people, like Flowers, who have a “passion for change” and grant them the “freedom to do their job.” The Meier building, which Grohe moved into two years ago, plays a significant role. With its open-plan offices, gym, sauna, canteen, and outdoor terraces, it resembles a Silicon Valley headquarters. And using a clear, high-performance, low-iron glass to maximize light, it is a conducive setting for big aspirations. “It’s a perfect manifestation of the corporate-culture change that we’ve been creating here, ” Haines says.

Across the conference table, Flowers, slight but sharp, speaks with a pan-European English accent (he’s worked in Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany over the last decade) and the air of a rising design celebrity in the garb of a company man. He was scouted while studying at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, whose alumni include Apple’s Jonathan Ive, and was offered a job with Electrolux, where he worked for three years before joining the giant team at Philips Design in Eindhoven. Upon meeting Haines in 2005, he recognized a design patron who would give him a chance to invent. “There were 280 of us in Philips. There I was a spectator, one of many. Here I can experiment.” He quickly coined the phrase “sensual minimalism” to describe the design language he envisioned for Grohe and produced a kind of geometric mascot, a cube with rounded edges, to inspire his team. Flowers conjures up the image of the human body in a shower to explain: “Hard-edged minimalism is inappropriate when you’re naked and vulnerable.”

I can’t help making a comparison with Apple: a CEO who understands and prioritizes design, a young in-house design team with enough hubris and desire to prove itself, and all the benefits of close-at-hand collaboration with the engineers, researchers, marketers, factory workers, and machines that influence the design process. Flowers’s latest recipient of a Red Dot award is the Rainshower Icon showerhead, which comes in an array of colors, recalling the fruit-flavored iMacs that began Apple’s revival.

When Flowers started at Grohe, Haines told him, “I want to be revered as Apple is revered, for products that are intuitive and make sense.” Shortly after arriving, Flowers stopped buying trend research and began sending his design team on scouting missions to trade fairs and exhibitions to look for longer-term societal trends. “By the time I’ve heard of something, it’s going to take me, if I’m lucky, nine months to design a range, and then the trend is gone or irrelevant,” Flowers says. Now his team tries to set trends. Black-and-white fixtures, now common among high-end manufacturers, were one of Flowers’s first predictions. His team also developed a palette of signature elements—a lozenge shape, a seven-degree angle and a circle—that would provide the “design DNA” for many products, visible in the shapes and angles of faucets and controls. The angles and indentations are gestural, intended to communicate function: a curving hand-held shower wand resembles a high-tech prosthetic limb. “I’m not interested in styling,” Flowers says, “but what a product communicates to you.”

The entire Ondus line, including Ondus Digitecture, a forthcoming modular collection designed to make specifying bathrooms easier, is driven by what Flowers calls “performance art.” That is, the product looks good when it’s not being used, which is, he says, 90 percent the time. Until it’s activated, a smooth black surface conceals many of the pressure-sensitive controls and the digital readout, which allow showerers to preset their preferred temperature and water flow. “Ergonomics would say, ‘Make those buttons big,’ but aesthetics say, ‘Make them small,’” Flowers says. “With Ondus I can have both; only when it’s switched on do you see the big backlit buttons.”