This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a pressure balance valve for a shower. It is the thing we are now going to have in our shower instead of the Barber Wilson exposed shower unit we had previously ordered. Luckily, it's still manufactured by a British company called Perrin & Rowe (the Brits seem to have the corner on the nice old fashioned looking plumbing) so it still feels high-end European. Plus this option is considerably less expensive, leaving us more $$ to blow on other things like Ted Muehling drawer pulls. (we probably won't get these, but they are truly things of beauty)

It seems that, awhile back, the building code expanded to include the requirement that all showers be fitted with an anti scalding device so as to protect us from being burned to death when a loved one flushes the toilet while we are in the shower. Which explains why all new buildings have those single valves rather than nice, simple hot and cold faucets. The one thing we are trying to avoid with all of our fixture choices is looking too much like a hotel. Even a nice one like the Mandarin Oriental. Which I love, by the way. For the upstairs bathroom, I'm hoping to avoid this issue altogether by putting my hands on the fixtures I used when the bathtub was in my studio in Brooklyn. If I can find that box.... Oh and speaking of bathtubs, anyboody have advice on where I can get mine re-enameled?