Kohler unveils ‘Pearlized’, an iridescent new bathroom finish with an under-the-sea backstory

For Washington state-based artist David Franklin, there’s nothing better than an evening boat cruise on Puget Sound with his wife, a couple of cocktails and the dazzling hues of the sea.

‘When you're out there at sunset it's like a colour dome — it's just this rainbow of colours from east to west,’ he says.

Franklin channelled all that vibrancy into a recent body of work created with Kohler’s MakerSpace artist residency program. Specifically, he made ceramic fish — hundreds and hundreds of them — which now hang in mesmerising arrays in Kohler showrooms and even the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

A funny thing happened when Franklin was developing glazes for his next school of sturgeon, walleye and trout: he helped invent Kohler’s newest finish, Pearlized.

It all started when one of the workers in the Kohler factory decided to stick some pieces of ceramic into a PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) machine, a multi-million-dollar device that’s usually used to put metallic finishes on faucet parts. The piece came out as gleaming as bullion. Franklin wondered, could they do the same for his fish?

After a period of trial and error, Franklin and the Kohler team managed to create a hypnotic pearlescent coating which exuded a rainbow-like gleam not unlike the artist’s treasured vistas of Puget Sound. ‘It captures both the iridescence of a fish, but also the water at sunset,’ he says.

The company liked the experiment so much that a cluster of Franklin’s shimmering fish became the centrepiece of Kohler’s booth at Salone del Mobile last year (according to Franklin, CEO David Kohler even kept a ceramic fish on his desk). ‘People were so excited about it,' Franklin remembers. 'I think the reaction showed that, wow, there is something here.'

Pearlized will make its official debut at Design Miami this December as part of a special installation designed by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios at the fair. The centrepiece of the installation will be a limited-edition Derring Carillon sink in the Pearlized finish. With its iridescent coating, the sink appears like a gleaming abalone shell, something straight from a mermaid's dream house.

While Kohler doesn’t have plans to expand Pearlized into other products just yet, the debut hints at more innovations to come and the company’s ongoing commitment to artist collaborations, one that was especially valuable to Franklin:

‘It was incredible to have carte blanche to play in the factory like that,’ he said.

Pearlized will be on view to the public at Design Miami from 3-7 December.