PHPD visits Flair Showers to learn why shower enclosures shouldn’t be underestimated
A lot of weight rests on the look and feel of a new home’s bathroom or kitchen. It’s these rooms that have their “furniture” readyinstalled, adding all the more weight to the choices housebuilders make. Potential homeowners are more confident in their assessments of taps and shower heads than they are of insulation choices or brick courses. Bathroom products should be specified thoughtfully, particularly if you want them to wow potential buyers.
With that in mind, we turn to Flair Showers, owned by the family-operated Sanbra Group and based in Dublin, whose team invited us to find out more about the business and how shower enclosures can make all the difference.
A range of options
Early on in the HQ Showroom tour, it became apparent that one of the main attributes of the Flair Showers range is a diversity of choice. As Johnny O’Callaghan, Sales Director ROI & Export at Flair Showers explains it: “The key thing really is that we supply a wide variety of products at every price point and every design.
Everything from a basic entry level to premium level shower enclosures. Depending on the budget that the builder has to spend, we can provide a solution for them.”
Indeed, the core Flair Showers offering is split in two with Flair PRO Collections and Harmony Collections. While Harmony represents the top-end of what Flair has to offer, both collections have multiple options within them.
The Harmony Collections
The Harmony Collections by Flair is a distinctive portfolio of high-performance showering solutions, offering versatile sizes and premium finishes. Each range within the collection features considered design elements that enhance the user experience. This design intent element is one of the ways that Flair stands out. Our peek behind the curtain included a tour of the design studio by the Sanbra Group Showering Division’s Lead Product Designer, Ronán O’ Grady, who expanded on clever little details woven into the enclosures. From countersunk and curved hinges designed for easy cleaning to patented magnetic guide systems or silent steel wheels, everything has been thought of. The handles themselves are the work of hand-crafted moulds that have been designed to conform to the hand naturally and to double as a convenient towel holder.
The Flair PRO Collections
Boasting an extensive selection of shower enclosures, wetrooms, and bathscreens, the trusted Flair PRO Collections excel in particular at offering installers an easy-fit showering solution. Constructed with up to 8 mm, toughened, Clearvue safety glass, the Verve PRO 8 collection is the latest addition to this with sliding and pivot doors, inline and frameless side panels, plus one door quadrants and offset quadrants. Designed for everyday luxury, the new collection is available in three finishes Silver, Matte Black and the on-trend finish of Brushed Brass.
The Verve PRO 8 Collection benefits from the Click Fit PRO system. Created to improve speed, ease of assembly and safety, Click Fit PRO is expertly engineered to simplify life for installers and can be fitted by just one rather than two. As the name would suggest, this is a screwless frame system, where sections just simply click together. On our tour of Flair’s impressive showrooms, we were actually treated to an installation race, where two of the company’s service engineers tried to build a shower enclosure the fastest.
So fast is the new system that Service Engineer Ryan Morley, who has been fitting shower enclosures for over 25 years, says it cuts a shower enclosure install by half the time. Ryan, who has been travelling across the UK in the manufacturer’s mobile showroom explained the reception the new system got at a housebuilding site where he was delivering training: “I could see their jaws drop and they said ‘it can’t be that easy’. I told them ‘it is’ and they said it’s going to make their lives so much easier.”
While this time-saving element is great to have on a site with a few plots on it, those with development plots ranging in the tens or even hundreds are really going to see the benefits of a system that requires less manpower and gets a bathroom finished that much quicker.
Both sides
One point the entire Flair Showers team stresses is the importance of both sides of a shower enclosure. The inside, where the homeowner will spend most of their time interacting with a shower enclosure, has to look just as good as the out.
This double-sided approach seems to be a running theme for the Irish manufacturer. Its enclosures are designed to be ergonomic and to appeal to potential homeowners, for whom we all know the importance of a nice bathroom. At the same time, Flair Showers is ensuring that these products work for those that are procuring and installing them. A team of service engineers like Ryan is constantly busy, ready to deliver training on housebuilding sites or fix any potential issues where required. Packaging and instructions have been designed for ease of use, the Flair Showers YouTube channel sports a host of installation videos and the manufacturer stocks spare parts 10 years past an enclosure’s production. All of this combined with new technology that’s purpose-built to ease and speed installation makes this Irish powerhouse a win-win all round.
Find out more at www.rdr.link/dbh031
