Editor Andrew Davies gingerly discusses whether kitchens or bathrooms come up with the best designs...

I like to think that every now and again we tackle some difficult subjects in kbbreview - the affect of regulations, dubious business practices, dodgy suppliers and, the one that really got everyone talking, whether sales reps should wear a tie.

Sometimes in this game you have to stick your neck out, so here's a good question for today's blog - which sector has the best designers, kitchens or bathrooms?

My humble opinion is that kitchens have better room designers and bathrooms have better product designers - but let me explain before you start egging my house.

I'm speaking in very general terms here of course, but the trend in kitchens for open plan living spaces has expanded exponentially the ability of the kitchen designer to let themselves go. With loads of space comes loads of options and therefore every project is different and with literally hundreds of components and choices going into every design there is an essential link between the manufacturer and the designer across all budgets.

Kitchen manufacturers, whether it's furniture, sinks, appliances or worktops, must be perfectly in tune with the people specifying, adjusting, and manipulating those products as they are installed in the customer's house.

Bathroom trends, on the other hand, have gone in the opposite direction. Consumers don't want bigger bathrooms, they just want more of them. Rooms have got smaller and smaller as en suites and cloakrooms have been added by pinching space from elsewhere.

And with significantly less components than a kitchen, bathroom manufacturers concentrate on their own product design and don't, in my opinion, have the same relationship with room designers as the kitchen sector does simply because they don't need to - in a small room, once the bath, basin, shower and furniture are in there's not a lot of room to be too clever with layout and ambiance. 

In other words, as a general rule bathroom designers don't have the same opportunities to be overtly clever with their projects as kitchens.

At this point I need to stress that of course there are plenty of very impressive bathroom designers out there doing excellent and imaginative work and, equally, it takes a lot of technical design skill to squeeze products into very small spaces and keep the room practical.

I'm saying for a moment that bathroom designers know less than kitchen equivalents, none of this is meant to be a criticism, it's more about raising the debate that relative relationships between manufacturers and the designers that specify their products into the average punters home is very different between kitchens and bathrooms.

Kitchen products tend to be very fixed in terms of size and application - a door is a door, a drawer is a drawer and built in appliances are all designed to fit in standard holes no matter who has made them. It's down to the room designer to take those mostly standard building blocks and turn them into what the consumer wants and therefore the relationship between manufacturer and designer needs to be strong.

In bathrooms, the product designer has much more freedom to come up with interesting stuff and this is what the industry concentrates on - the room designer doesn't have anywhere near as much influence on this as kitchens and the project becomes much more about product choice rather than how those products are used to create an overall design.

So, compared to kitchens, bathroom product design is often more outwardly innovative and interesting to look at.

Again, I'm speaking very, very generally here to make a point, but what do you think? Is it time for bathroom manufacturers to start putting themselves more into the mind of the room designer? And, equally, is it time for kitchen manufacturers to literally start to think outside of the box?