The Death of Chrome: The Challenges of Colour Fixtures

There is a certain importance to matching your fixtures, accessories, and hardware when renovating or designing your home. Mismatched colour schemes can throw the feel of a room off, even if each piece looks good individually. When it comes to your own home, this can be a challenge, especially if you want to coordinate your kitchen and bathroom, and even more so if you are sourcing from multiple companies. 

In the past, getting your kitchen or bathroom accessories to match your hardware was easy; everything came in chrome. It didn’t matter if you went to just one company or many to furnish and decorate your home, because chrome from one company will match chrome from any other. While this might have been easy, it certainly wasn’t interesting. When everyone’s kitchens and bathrooms have the same style, it’s hard to get excited about renovating. The response to this has been a clear trend towards colours like gold, black, and copper when renovators or builders are picking out their new fixtures. Meanwhile, chrome has become less and less popular as flashier finishes take center stage. 

Despite infusing the renovation industry with some much needed fresh styles, these new finishes have created issues of their own; namely, they are hard to match, especially between one company to another. Your faucet manufacturer’s copper might be your lighting fixtures manufacturer’s rose gold, and matte black from one company might look quite different from that of another. 

Recently, Kelly from Surrey decided to think outside the box when renovating her home, and bought a copper coloured faucet. It looked beautiful, and worked well with her counters and cabinets. However, when she tried to find a pendant light to match the faucet, she found it was very difficult to find a fixture that actually matched her faucet. She quickly discovered that even though a finish might have the same name as the one on her faucet, that didn’t necessarily mean that the colours would match perfectly, or even go well together at all. 

In the end, there’s no easy answer when it comes to finishes. What is important, however, is to know what you’re getting into when you start to pick out color schemes, and decide for yourself whether the more exciting vibes of newer finishes make the hassle of matching worth it, or whether the reliability of chrome is worth the lack of adventure.