Kitchen Fixture Finishes For Every Style

The kitchen design is personal. The color palette, countertop choices, cabinetry, backsplash designs, and even appliances we choose create a certain ambiance or vibe. Fixtures and hardware, however, are what complete it, ground it, pull it all together, and make it glimmer or gleam. Today, many quality fixture lines and collections offer comprehensive selections of finishes available for their faucets, handles, and other accessories. Now, you can get the shape, size, and style of fixture that you want with the features you need without having to settle for a finish that doesn’t quite fit. Thanks to all the choices available, you can make choices in kitchen fixture finishes as part of your kitchen design vision.

Explore Kitchen Faucet Finishes

Polished Chrome

With its cold, hard, mirror-like shine, polished chrome is usually chrome plating applied over a brass faucet core and then polished to reflective brilliance. The signature shine often has depth and a cool slate-colored undertone. Polished chrome finishes are noted for both their long-lasting durability and their timeless appeal.

Polished chrome has been around for generations, making it highly versatile. It can serve a modern kitchen as easily as a more traditional one because it adds light wherever it’s placed.

If you prefer palettes of white, light colors, or neutrals, polished chrome can give the flash of light that will keep the composition from becoming bland. When cabinets, counters, backsplashes, and walls are all light, polished chrome and other reflective surfaces help to keep the look bright and clean. Inversely, palettes of rich colors paired with white can benefit from the silvery highlights that polished chrome delivers because the reflectivity of the chrome allows it to take on a chameleon effect guaranteed to complement the color.

Because polished chrome tends to have blue undertones, it often works well with blues, soft greens, charcoals, blacks, and browns with gray tones. Since it offers so much reflectivity, it can be a real asset with both soft colors and vivid ones.

Matte Black

Plated over brass, matte black is dramatic. The finish may have a slight gleam but is not shiny. Instead, the solid color gives the piece weight and depth, often defining everything around it. It also brings attention to the exact shape and features of the fixture itself. Without the distractions of shine and reflectivity, the piece’s power of form increases.

Matte black has been a more recent addition to popular fixture finishes, but it’s become a rapid go-to favorite for sophistication and drama. In art, black is a key player in contrast and bringing out the color values of the surrounding palette, and it does the same in kitchen design.

With matte black finishes, choices range from creating high contrasts to working with gradients of neutral colors to drawing together a rich jewel-tone composition to experimenting with depths of black through lighting and a few pops of color.

Matte black is often used against all-white designs for contrast or as an anchor to a white countertop on deep gray cabinetry, for example. However, it can also be beautifully used with natural wood cabinetry or stonework. If you love a long shiny counter, a matte black faucet can serve as the perfect foil, making the counter appear even glossier and the faucet a statement landmark.

Matte Black With Satin Brass Accents

Offering that little bit of something extra, satin brass accents against a matte black body add the luxurious aesthetic of detailing. If you love the look of matte black yet find it a bit heavy, adding brass accents lightens the visual and enriches the effect without overdoing it.

The combination of the two metals also offers the best of both worlds when you want the contrast of black yet need something a little more to bring in the other colors and textures you’d like to incorporate in your kitchen. If black alone feels too harsh or monotone, satin brass accents offer a powerful detail that can highlight or complement other kitchen features. When it comes to mixing metals—a faucet versus cabinetry hardware or a mirror, for example—the matte-black-satin-brass juxtaposition is a winning combination.

Matte black with satin brass accents has a unique look that allows you to use both brass tones and black throughout a kitchen and pull it all together. It also lets you unify combinations of wood grain and dark solids because the touch of brass finishes warm wood tones. In a kitchen featuring a granite slab countertop, for example, with complex patterning, the matte black offers grounding while the satin brass adds a complementary brightness, but since neither is shiny, the fixture complements rather than competes with the other elements.

Ultrasteel

Ultrasteel finishes use stainless steel plating for an aesthetic that is gray metallic yet has a softer, warmer, brushed look than the hard shine of polished chrome, for example. On the scale of bright to dark—polished chrome to matte black, for example—ultra steel holds the middle ground with luster.

Stainless steel or ultra steel has long been a workhorse finish for kitchen sinks, but with its prevalence in major appliance finishes like refrigerators and dishwashers, for example, it’s also become a popular choice in kitchen faucet finishes.

Ultrasteel often works well with strong colors, the mellow gray shimmer offering soothing contrast and a bit of light in a kitchen with red cabinets, for example, or other strong colors. It also works well in modern, industrial-style kitchens designed around functionality, simplicity, and cleanliness. Against natural wood, ultra steel finishes keep the look soft and modern, the underlying warm tones of the metal enhancing wood grain rather than competing with it. In a kitchen full of neutrals, it can offer accents and light more subtle and warm than polished chrome, for example, and without the visual weight of matte black.

Satin Brass

Thanks to brushing technology used to soften the shine of traditional brass, satin brass offers the magical touch of an eye-catching golden glow. Somewhat like ultra steel, it offers mid-range tones but in a warmth that is rich yet more subtle than conventional brass and a lighter hue than the dated browns of antique brass.

Satin brass offers a muted elegance that blends easily with modern and contemporary design styles. It also has the ability to enhance and tastefully update more traditional homes. Simply put, it’s pretty.

Subtle tones of brass make a space bright and warm and add a golden color value to the palette. Whether it’s used with whites and other light colors or dark ones, satin brass fixtures tend to pop, warming even the coolest or darkest of color schemes with rich golden light. If you worry about how to add coordinating accents, caned chairs made of light natural wood, lighting featuring natural plant fibers, golden wood flooring, or even satin accents on features like cabinetry hardware or décor can offer cohesiveness and make it all fit together.

DXV’s Etre Collection—A Full Selection of Kitchen Fixture Finishes

DXV is a well-known name in the world of luxury bathroom and kitchen collections that “pay tribute to the past and celebrate the present.” Its Etre Collection takes its design notes from Machine Age Modernism, creating a sleek line of faucets and apron sinks that are rooted in “functionality, practicality, and purpose” yet present in assorted finishes that can only be described as beautiful. The collection includes the Etre single-handle pull-down kitchen faucet with a lever handle, a matching bar faucet, a soap dispenser, and an optional escutcheon, as well as apron-front kitchen sinks in four sizes.

• Etre Collection faucets and fixtures are available in all of the finishes—polished chrome, matte black, matte black with satin brass accents, ultra steel, and satin brass.
• The faucet’s design is simple—a single high arc with a 360-degree swivel spout. The Etre kitchen faucet is 17⅞ inches tall without an escutcheon.
• A simple lever lets you select temperature and volume.
• The spout features knurling on the pull-down sprayer. Your hand will never slip, and the distinctive patterning adds to the aesthetic.
• A toggle on the back of the knurled spout lets you switch between spray functions—a shower spray gentle enough for delicate produce and a steady stream that can quickly fill a pot.
• Faucets feature ceramic disc valve cartridges, eliminating drips and leaks.
• The faucet design allows for a flush single-hole counter mount or the addition of an escutcheon base.
• The bar faucet is a smaller version of the kitchen faucet, complete with a 360-degree swivel spout, pull-down spout with knurling and toggle to go between spray and stream, single-lever control, and ceramic disc valve cartridges. The bar faucet is 13¾ inches tall without an escutcheon.
• The soap dispenser is ideal for soaps, detergents, and even hand lotion and fills easily from the top.
• Etre Collection fire clay apron-front sinks are handcrafted in Italy. Sinks feature a smooth white glossy triple-layer non-porous finish that resists chipping and scratches. Single bowl sinks come in three sizes—30 inches, 33 inches, and 36 inches—while the double bowl apron sink is 36 inches. All sinks feature 10-inch-deep bowls able to accommodate large pots easily. Single-bowl sinks have offset drains to allow more usable sink space.

The Etre Collection’s sleek, clean design and functional features make its faucets and sinks the perfect addition to any kitchen, and the quality finishes ensure they’ll be perfect for every kitchen.

Kitchen Design and Kitchen Faucet Finishes

Whether you’re ready to treat yourself to a new kitchen faucet, you’re considering a kitchen remodel or you’re planning a new home build, Coburn’s is ready to help. Schedule an appointment with your nearest Coburn’s Kitchen & Bath Showroom to speak with one of our experienced design consultants.