An architect who specialized in faucets: the Milan-born designer Davide Mercatali

Milan, 1948: that is the place and the year Davide Mercatali was born, and his architecture degree, earned there, is dated 1973. What he did with it is less expected. He specialized in faucets, the word his Fantini biography chooses. The rest of his list reads like a walk through a house: sofas and armchairs, lamps, flatware, fireplaces. Fantini’s biography calls him architect, designer and promoter of brands and events tied to industrial production, and the third title is literal. He helped establish ZEUS in 1984 and Metals in 1990; in 1995 he organized INGENUO, a Tokyo show of prototypes by some thirty Milanese designers.

His name reaches an American bath through I Balocchi, drawn with Paolo Pedrizzetti during their decade as partners and produced by Fantini, which reissued it in 2012 as the company’s first colored faucet series. Red next to chrome changes how a powder room or a hotel bath reads; picking the color for a U.S. project is the step La Mercanti works through with the designer of record.