Chrome. For decades, it’s been the stalwart of our bathrooms. Taps, showers, towel rails—regardless of the brand, the style, or the cost, there was always that one dominant finish. Many designs, many manufacturers, one result: chrome.
The truth is, for years, the uniformity wasn’t down to homeowner choice, but a straightforward lack of finish options from the manufacturers themselves. Chrome was the standard, and we were all expected to live with it.
But today, the market dynamic is fundamentally changing. Homeowners are no longer settling. They are demanding personality, texture, and warmth, and the market is finally reacting.
If your bathroom is looking a bit behind the curve, don’t worry. Your chrome fixtures are likely well-made and high-quality; they are perfect candidates for a transformation. The great news? Chrome isn’t dead, but is it dyeing to be different? (Yes,we meant ‘dyeing’)
The New Normal: Why One Finish Is No Longer Enough
The move away from chrome hasn’t happened overnight. Bathroom finishes like brushed bronze, rose gold, and gun metal have been around for a few years now, often sitting in the high-end, niche market. But that is no longer the case.
Today, these alternatives are stronger than ever and firmly entrenched in the mainstream. Every manufacturer now offers a catalogue of options because homeowners are demanding them. The chrome monopoly has been shattered by a myriad of finishes.
The options truly are almost limitless. It’s no longer about replacing for like-for-like; it’s about custom design across the entire room. How about a chic gun metal shower, a brushed bronze tap set, or perhaps a beautiful, statement rose gold towel rail? This is the new normal for modern bathroom design.
The Matching Crisis: When One Finish Doesn’t Mean One Colour
You’ve done the hard work. You’ve spent hours poring over catalogues and browsing online, finally deciding on a beautiful new finish—say, Gun Metal or Brushed Brass—to give your bathroom that luxurious feel. You choose your taps, wastes, and shower from a trusted manufacturer. Beautiful.
But then the real challenge begins. While that manufacturer offers their main brassware, what about those other essential accessories that need to blend in? The robe hooks, the shower profiles, the flush plates, or the ever-important toilet roll holder? Often, the manufacturer either doesn’t make those items, or only offers them in chrome.
This forces you to look elsewhere, and this is where the major problem lies: one manufacturer’s brushed brass is another manufacturer’s brushed gold. You end up with a beautiful brushed brass tap that simply doesn’t match the brushed brass towel rail you bought separately. This extreme inconsistency is an incredibly common occurrence in the world of modern bathrooms.
The Subtle Mismatch
Base Material
Your brassware (taps/showers) might be solid brass, but accessories like a robe hook or a flush plate are often made from completely different materials, such as stainless steel, aluminium, or ABS plastic. Any finishing process—whether PVD, electroplating, or even more specialised coating methods—must be specifically tailored to the base material. Because the base materials require entirely different preparation and thermal processes, the final finish will always have a subtle variance in chemical adherence, look, and depth.
The Surface
The final appearance of any finish, whether it’s a high-shine gloss chrome or a soft brushed metal, is entirely determined by how light reflects off its surface. Since manufacturers rarely use the exact same surface preparation or polishing technique, the light will never reflect identically between two different products. This difference in reflection creates the visible colour discrepancy, making a perfect match impossible.
The Process And Batch Variation
Many durable modern finishes (Gun Metal, Brass, Rose Gold) are created using PVD, a high quality but highly sensitive process done in production batches. Any minor deviation in control between one production run and the next leads to slight variations in colour tone. This means you can order two items from the same manufacturer a few months apart and still face a slight colour shift.
Lighting
Finally, the colour variation you see is greatly amplified by your bathroom lighting. Bathroom lighting—which is often cool-toned, bright, and directional—is particularly unforgiving. Subtle differences in texture or finish tone become highly obvious under the harsh, consistent light of your home. Colour variation with lighting in a room has huge ramifications.
Additional Issues And Costs
This entire issue can be magnified if you are renovating a bathroom and have a concealed cistern already installed. If you have a pre-existing concealed cistern, like for example a Geberit cistern, you don’t want the extra expense and time of removing the wall and installing another cistern just so you can put on a flush plate that matches your brassware. As Geberit were one of the pioneers of the concealed cistern and are renowned for their quality, you have even more reason not to want to remove and replace it with another manufacturer just to enable you to have a flush plate in the same finish as your taps. This is a common dilemma, and one we have come across many times here at flushplates.com.
So, when you look at all these variables, it becomes clear why achieving a perfect, seamless match is so difficult. Ultimately, mixing different materials, different manufacturers, and different PVD batches means those subtle mismatches are unavoidable.
Gaining Control: The Bespoke Finishing Solution
So, how do you tackle the curse of mismatched bathroom finishes?
The solution is to fill the critical gap left by manufacturers who simply don’t offer the necessary accessories—like flush plates, robe hooks, and toilet roll holders—in the same trending finishes as their main brassware. Our service gives you the ability to treat those hard-to-find items to blend perfectly with the designer finish you already have installed.
We specialise in taking new chrome flush plates or accessories and blending them with your main brassware. We treat every flush plate—whether it is ABS plastic or chrome-plated metal—through our highly controlled, multi-phase process. After detailed surface preparation (Phase 1), a specialised adhesion primer is used before we infuse high-grade pigment dyes (Phase 2). This disciplined process allows us to achieve the colour depth required to replicate the aesthetic of virtually any finish.
This means we can blend your accessories to blend with manufacturer bathroom finishes like Brushed Brass, Gun Metal, or Matt Black, or we can replicate the aesthetic of specific, high-end designer finishes, including Gessi satin brass, Samuel Heath country bronze, THG umber matt, Graff brushed red gold, or Axor polished black chrome.
We have worked with countless homeowners and designers to achieve a visually cohesive result across their bathrooms, ensuring those vital finishing touches finally harmonise with their main taps and showers.
The Final Touch: Achieve Seamless Cohesion
There is no need to be despondent that your brassware manufacturer doesn’t provide that towel rail or flush plate you need. The good news is that by blending finishes properly, you can still achieve the high-end, cohesive look you desire.
Achieving this level of cohesion is simpler than you think.
Our focus is solely on transforming the piece you already own. Simply head over to our store now
Ready to transform your bathroom? Head over to our store to explore the finishing costs including a brand new plate. If you don’t see the specific accessory or service you need listed, feel free to contact us directly using our contact form, and we will provide you with a bespoke quote for finishing your item.
Stop settling for close enough, and start designing the cohesive space you intended.
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