Shelton, Mindel & Associates' Latest Supersleek Bath and Kitchen Fittings for Waterworks

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Faucets, towel bars, and the like have often been described as jewelry for the home, but architect Lee F. Mindel rejects that superficial comparison. A cofounder of the Manhattan firm Shelton, Mindel & Associates , he prefers to think of such fittings as hybrids of high style and practicality. Hence Formwork, the name of the company’s latest kitchen and bath collection for Waterworks .

"I think we’ve created a new vocabulary for delivering water," says Mindel, picking up a tub filler that looks like a miniature cantilevered staircase—elegantly flattened and supersleek. "There is a contiguous transition from one plane to another and then to another. It’s a new silhouette."

Though the Formwork designs bring to mind the masterful functionalism of Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus, the line—Shelton, Mindel’s third for Waterworks since 2002—is anything but retro. "This is not a revival," Mindel says, revealing that his team utilized "technology that was not available to us before, like 3-D printing" in the creative process. A leading member of the collaborative effort was Peter Shelton, the architect’s longtime business partner, who died in 2012 while the products were still being refined.

Faucet handles resemble dials, levers, and joysticks; towel rods are barely there bars of chrome- or nickel-plated brass. The washstand is composed of a single piece of molded glass set atop a skeletal metal base. Even the intriguing ribbed texture of the line’s cotton towels is an exercise in abstraction, the architect says, "exploring the warp and the weft." To complement these offerings, Shelton, Mindel lent its expertise to an array of stone and ceramic surfaces, which include penny tiles in succulent shades such as seafoam-green and nautilus-blue.

The designs may be reductivist, but they are remarkably engaging. "People have an intimate relationship with the elements of a bath, so we avoided sharp edges," says Mindel, noting that the collection does its job with uncommon subtlety. "Pure forms don’t take over their environment." waterworkom

Click to view a selection of products from the AD100 firm's Formwork kitchen and bath collection .