My wife and I run a small property business in Western Pennsylvania. We buy, renovate, rent, and sell homes. I am a Pennsylvania-registered home improvement contractor and head up our small work crew. We have a good deal of experience in both mid-price and luxury kitchen and bathroom renovations. I started doing renovation work in Europe, and am thus quite familiar with GROHE bathroom fixtures, which have been a mainstay overseas for generations.
There’s a great deal to say about GROHE, and about the complicated situation this old, very-well-respected German brand is in right now, but there really isn’t room for it here. Please, don’t judge the whole GROHE product line by this one faucet. That would be deeply unfair.
What’s good about this faucet:
1. The StarLight Chrome finish is not just a fancy name for a nice chrome finish. GROHE has been continually working on the durability of its chrome finishes for 75 years. This faucet will wipe down clean and shiny today, tomorrow, and in fifty years of regular use.
2. GROHE SilkMove technology utilizes precision engineering and Teflon coatings to make everything in its product line move with smooth authority, and that precision in motion will last decades. There’s very little play and wiggle in the moving parts of GROHE fixtures.
3. This faucet’s base is ingeniously designed to practically eliminate all the places crud builds up on regular kitchen faucets. There is an outer casing that extends all the way down to the counter, and that’s what turns and moves 55 degrees right and left rather than the inner cylinder. It’s a very smart, clean design.
4. The pull out spray has a good, deep connection. This is not the sort of pull-out faucet where you have to seat the sprayer two or three times after using it to make sure it’s fully in its place.
5. The hose on these sprayers is most often a very stiff black nylon mesh, stiff enough when under pressure to make it difficult to move the sprayer around easily. GROHE utilizes a softer gray hose that’s more flexible and useful.
6. The faucet is small. It is ideal for a small apartment kitchen sink or anywhere else you need to save space. It is not the best possible faucet for a large, luxury kitchen sink installation.
What’s not good about this faucet:
1. All my objections to this faucet relate to its ease of installation. The most difficult standard installation possible is on an existing 1 1/4 granite countertop epoxied to the bottom cabinets, with a standard 35 mm installation hole whose center is set back two inches from the edge of the counter, on top of a large, single-basin undermount sink.
I’ve made up a granite mockup of this sort of installation and strapped it to a TV table tray so I can elevate the block and shoot good-quality photographs under it. It works very well for illustration purposes, but you have to imagine a large, deep sink with a one-inch lip in place in front of the granite, cutting off all easy access to the installation hole. Please see Figure 1 for an illustration of the clearance problem.
2. Please look at Figure No. 2, which is simply a shot of the 35 mm installation hole in my mock-up, cut with a nearly-new diamond bit and a wet-drilling purpose-made water reservoir jig. This is the best possible way to cut clean, precise 35 mm installation holes in slab granite. It is also slow and more than a bit messy, and many countertop installers still prefer dry-vacuum setups. Unfortunately, the dry set-ups do not typically cut holes this clean. If the installation hole in your countertop is NOT clean-cut like this, this faucet will likely be very difficult to install, and there’s nothing you can do about the situation after the hole has been drilled.
Please look at Figure No. 3, which is an annotated illustration of the faucet’s internal body setup. It should be clear that if the hole is not cleanly cut, the lip indicated will be compromised and therefore the seal between the rubber gasket and the hoses inside the faucet body will be compromised. Your pressurized water supply hoses will slowly corrode while your faucet also drips water down into your bottom cabinet carcass. For this reason, most US-designed faucets which are designed to go in over a granite countertop have a small stationary base plate sealed to the counter with non-staining plumber’s putty. It both guarantees that water doesn’t get into the bottom cabinet through such a gap and visually hides any drilling imperfection.
Not only is there no base plate here, the installation diagrams showed, to my astonishment, that the hole diameter specified is 1 5/16 inches, or 34 mm.
A 34 mm or 1 5/16 in. diamond hole-boring bit for this sort of work in the Americas or Europe is extremely difficult to find. The standard size of these bits is 35 mm or 1 3/8 in., pure and simple. Moreover, the standard drill bit is about a 64th of an inch wider in diameter than 1 3/8 inches due to the diamond edge brazing that makes the bit work.
That installation diagram can only bear that labeling as some kind of repugnant technical strategy to deal with an inexperienced installer who complains too loudly about this obvious installation problem. “Oh, is the installation hole 1 5/16th in diameter? No? Well, then the fact that the faucet didn’t perform is YOUR fault. Too bad, so sad!”
In my 1 3/8 in. + 1/64 in.-diameter *clean-cut* hole, the faucet performs exactly as advertised.
3. Please look at Figure No. 4, which is an annotated photograph of the bottom of the installed faucet. The installation calls for a large plastic stabilizing block to be set on the underside. Unfortunately, if you have a stainless-steel undermount sink, setting this block so that it doesn’t fasten incorrectly over the (standard) one-inch lip of the undermount sink would take a good deal of care. And if there’s a glob of the epoxy used to seal the sink to the counter right there? Well, you’re going to have to grind down the block a bit.
4. Please look at Figure No. 5, which is the same photograph as Figure No. 4, annotated in a different way. The hose for the pull-out spigot clamps on to the same brass post that the nut that holds the whole assembly fastens over. The only way (given the near-total lack of clearance that you would have with a single-basin undermount sink) to assemble this without scratching up the brass post significantly is using a pass-through socket set with a 17mm bit. As you can see, it’s far too deep for a deep-well socket.
If your installer doesn’t have a metric pass-through socket set at the ready when installing this, she or he will probably use an old-fashioned basin wrench, which has a good chance of scratching up the post, thus possibly compromising the clamping connection for the spigot. Metric pass-through socket sets that include a good-sized 17mm bit do not grow on trees in Western PA, and they might not in your area as well.
What does all this mean? Well, put plainly and simply, if your installer is not very well-equipped and experienced, and also doesn’t read this review before getting down to work, installing this faucet on the sort of standard granite counter setup I've been describing would be a nightmare, if it’s even possible. For this reason, and not because of the faucet’s quality, I can’t recommend it.
On the other hand, if you’re an experienced DIYer and own a metric pass-through socket set, AND you have the time and patience to see a tricky installation like this through on a smaller sink, you’ll end up with a winner. If you’re installing this faucet on a topmount sink and you have an extra standard escutcheon/base in chrome to use with it, you'll have few problems.That’s the worst part of it. It’s really a great, well-built GROHE faucet. The design just doesn’t seriously take into account American installation realities.
For some reason, HomeDepot.com has also classified this faucet as a “bathroom faucet,” even though on the GROHE America website this model is listed as a kitchen faucet. The faucet also doesn’t come with a drain stopper mechanism or a drain assembly, which should have been a dead giveaway, but clearly wasn’t to the five other Seeds reviewers who looked at this faucet. But it is a kitchen faucet, and I’ve reviewed it as such here.
Pros: Durable, Looks Great, Modern, Stylish
Cons: Difficult to Install