GROHE ICON 3D. Creating the impossible.

“The impossible begins with the belief that you can do it,” says Michael Seum, GROHE’s Vice President of Design. Seum has led GROHE’s world-renowned in-house design team in this ground-breaking 3D printed faucet project. Tasked with applying the latest 3D metal-printing technology to GROHE faucets, Seum immediately saw the potential to do something dramatically different to any existing faucet designs.

The GROHE Design Studio has completely reimagined two of GROHE’s most iconic and architectural existing faucet designs – the pure, clean-lined Atrio and the diamond-inspired multi-faceted Allure Brilliant. “We tried to capture the intent of the original designs, but to also bring a little bit of magic,” says Seum. Designers and engineers worked tirelessly together to pare back the design, creating a 3D printed faucet that is so light it makes you question how it can work at all.

“When you look at it in profile it appears almost like a traditional faucet,” Seum explains. “It’s not until you look at it from the front that you see its silhouette. You cannot believe how thin it is, you cannot imagine where the water comes from.”

This response of delight and surprise is the magic Seum sought to create. With it GROHE has changed what is possible in a faucet. “It’s not so much an evolution: it’s a revolution,” Seum says. With the dramatically different Icon 3D printed faucets, the impossible is brought vividly to life.

GROHE’s 3D metal-printing process makes virtually any geometry possible and invites you to rediscover materiality: By reducing the shapes to their essentials, the corrosion-resistant steel used as a raw and at the same time highly castable material also comes to the fore in the final product.

The ultra-thin walls of the GROHE Atrio Icon 3D and the hollow interior in the familiar silhouette of GROHE Allure Brilliant make the water flow look like a magical, optical illusion. The faucets of the two lines thus become an aesthetic highlight, available in a brushed raw steel finish.

Icon 3D combines state-of-the-art digital technology with hand-crafted, proven GROHE quality. The components are produced by printing metal, using a powder bed laser melting process. Each component for the faucet consists of approximately 4,700 layers that are each 0.06 millimetres thick, providing it with forging strength. After printing, the component is mechanically treated on a CNC milling machine, followed by a manual grinding and fine brushing procedure as the last step of the finish. The elaborate process defines the exclusivity of the Icon 3D series: Each product is unique; the edition of the collection is limited to a few pieces per year. GROHE Icon 3D will be available on request as an exclusive piece for the bathroom.