KWC Faucets Review & Rating Updated: December 10, 2024

Imported

Switzerland

North American Distributor
Forté Brands LLC
393 Fortune Boulevard
Milford, MA 01757 USA
877-207-5227
info@fortebrands.com

KWC Group AG
KWC-Gasse 1
5726 Unterkulm
Switzerland
ws-service.us@kwc.ch

Rating

Business Type

Product Range

Kitchen & Bath Faucets

Certifications

Brands
KWC

Street Price

$191-$3,100

Warranty Score

Cartridge

Lifetime

Powder Coated Finishes

5-years

Chrome & Stainless Finishes

Lifetime

Mechanical Parts

Lifetime

Proof of Purchase

Required

Transferable

No

Meets U.S. Warranty
Law Requirements

No

Warranty Footnotes:

• Read the KWC faucet warranty.
• Learn more about faucet warranties.
• Discover how to enforce your consumer warrant at The Warranty Game.

This Company In Brief

A Swiss company, KWC is a relatively small manufacturer of high-end all-­ and stainless steel faucets manufactured in Switzerland. It sells in the U.S. and Canada through its distributor, Forté Buying Group trading as Forté Brands.

KWC was founded in 1874 by Adolf Karrer and reorganized in 1919 as Karrer, Weber & Cie.

It remained family-run company until 1984 when the German company, Hansa Metallwerke AG, became the majority shareholder and changed the name to KWC AG.

It was subsequently sold to Franke Group AG, then, in 2024, as KWC Group AG, to Paini S.p.A. Rubinetterie, an italian faucet manufacturer.

The company has a reputation for selling very durable faucets in the crisp Nordic-Hanseatic style favored in Northern Europe. A lot of its style offerings can be had from other companies at less cost but it is more difficult to reproduce the legendary reliability of the company's faucets.

The company's warranty falls short of the standard North American lifetime warranty on all parts and components with a short 5-year warranty on finishes other than stainless steel and chrome.

Customer service by Forté Brands is excellent but applies only to faucets purchased in 2024. For faucets bought in prior years or from other sources, customer support is from Switzerland, handled through emails and proceeds at a snail's pace.

Essentially a boutique faucet maker, the KWC has been remarkably astute in its marketing of contemporary faucets. In consequence, it has emerged from the cloud of obscurity that envelopes most small faucet manufacturers to become nearly as well known to the buying public as much larger competitors such as

The company manufactures contemporary luxury faucets for the kitchen and bath. Designed, prototyped, and manufactured in Unterkulm, Switzerland.

KWC faucets have long been noted for their clean, crisp designs in the North German or Hanseatic tradition similar to the styles offered by German companies.

The Company

The firm was created in 1874 when Adolf Karrer bought a mill in Unterkulm, Switzerland to manufacture high-quality mechanical music boxes and steel pianos. It was initially very successful, growing to 40 employees in its first year.

With Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877 and its improvement by Emile Berliner to use a flat disc record rather than Edison's bulky cylinders, the bottom quickly fell out of the music box business.

The firm turned its metalworking talents to making sanitary faucets.

The manufacture of faucets was a very new and exciting industry at the turn of the 20th century.

The compression valve that made faucets possible had been introduced by Guest & Chrimes Brass­works of Rotherham, England just a few decades earlier, and the water faucet was still very much a novelty in most of Europe.

Its place in the world of European sanitary fittings was solidified in 1910 with the wide publicity surrounding the re-opening of the luxury Ritz Hotel in Paris equipped with KWC faucets.

With the death of Adolf Karrer in 1895, management of the firm was assumed by Eugen Weber who produced the company's first gas faucets in 1895 and water faucets in 1897.

Ownership History

In 1920 the firm became the family-owned stock company, Karrer Weber & Cie AG.

It was owned and operated by the Karrer-Weber families until being acquired in 1984 by Hansa Metallwerke AG of Stuttgart, Germany which shortened the company name to the catchier KWC AG.

In 2010 IK Investment Partners, a German private equity group, acquired a controlling interest in Hansa. It then sold KWC to its Swiss competitor,

Franke Holding AG

Franke consolidated KWC with its existing Franke faucets into its Water Systems division.

Franke is a global player in the sanitary ware market with over 12,500 worldwide employees.

Starting as a metalwork company in 1911, it started making kitchen sinks in 1925 and eventually became a leading European supplier of kitchen systems primarily for commercial and public institutions.

It has been less successful in penetrating the residential market.

Its acquisition of KWC was part of its effort to boost its standing in residential sales.

KWC was combined with Frane's own faucets in what became its Water Systems division.

Eleven years after its acquisition of KWC, in early 2021, Franke decided it would never reach its corporate goal of becoming one of the three top players in the faucet industry.

It sold Water Systems, including KWC and Franke faucets, to an investment group managed by Equistone Partners Europe, a private equity firm.

Paini S.p.A. Rubinetterie

Equistone spent two years disentangling Water Systems from the rest of Franke's operations and reorganizing its purchase into two groups.

Franke's mostly commercial faucets were incorporated into a professional division specializing in the commercial and public sectors that ultimately became KWC Group Management AG.

KWC's mostly residential products were grouped in a home division specializing in residential kitchens and baths. It was reoganized as KWC Group AG.

In May 2024, the Italian faucet manufacturer Paini S.p.A. Rubinetterie bought KWC Group AG for an undisclosed sum. The sale encompassed all of KWC's assets including its factory in Switzerland.

Piani has not yet announced its plans for KWC other than its intention to use its acquisition to improve its sales in the Northern European Germanic countries.

However, the merger should be good for both companies. Paini gets a state-of-the-art factory in Switzerland to complement its own modern factory in Italy, and KWC gets international distribution and some of the best industrial and product design talent in the world.

KWC Quality

KWC faucets have a reputation of being very reliable with a long service life free of problems. The proprietary KWC cartridge is one of the best and most KWC faucets are equipped with the incomparable Neoperl^® aerator, a component invented by KWC in 1954.

All of the excellent Swiss craftsmanship that goes into the manufacture of the faucets is expensive, however, and the faucets are generally pricey as are the parts to fix the faucets should they ever break while out of warranty.

For example, a non-proprietary 40mm ceramic mixer cartridge, even a very good one, sells for under $40.00, while a proprietary KWC 40mm cartridge retails for over $150.00.

The faucets are resolutely contemporary. KWC does not sell faucets in traditional or transitional motifs. The narrow design range of KWC faucets makes most of the styles unsuitable for any but contemporary kitchens.

Buyers on a budget and those who aim to duplicate the look of a heritage kitchen may have to look elsewhere for a faucet.

KWC Design

Before 2022, the designs were added yearly by the seemingly inexhaustible creativity of industrial design partners Michael Lammel and Bertrand Illert, founders and owners of NOA, a design studio in Aachen, Germany.

In addition to keeping the KWC at the forefront of innovative faucet design, NOA also designed kitchen and dining ware for WMF Group, and porcelain sanitary wares for VitrA, a division of the ceramics giant, Eczacibasi Group of Istanbul, Turkey.

KWC earned recognition for its design finesse in numerous international design competitions. The ZOE faucet has been the recipient of an iF World Design Guide award (2016), a Good Design award (2015-2016) from the Chicago Athenaeum — the oldest and most coveted of the international design prizes — and a special German Design Award (2016).

Other winning designs include the AVA, INTRO, ONO, and PIANA faucets.

Many KWC designs, however, are becoming dated.

Some are more than two decades old and have been widely copied. It is increasingly possible to find more of less original KWC styles in mid-priced faucet lines such as Delta and Moen often at much less cost and with no lessening of reliability.

The Neoperl Revolution

In 1954 KWC engineers made a major contribution to the faucet industry with their invention of the Neoperl aerator that replaced the conventional screen aerator. It gave the water flowing from a faucet a uniform shape that prevented water from splashing.

The rights to the invention were transferred to Hans Denzler & Co., a new company organized to manufacture and distribute the device. Now Neoperl AG, its innovation has spread across the world's faucet industry.

Modern Neoperl aerators not only shape water, but restrict flow to the maximum limit permitted by law, and, in faucets with built-in sprays, prevent backflow that could contaminate a household's water supply.

Better faucets the world over use genuine Neoperl aerators and if a faucet is not equipped with a Neoperl-brand aerator, it is almost certainly using an immitation based on patent-expired Neoperl designs.

KWC Website

North America no longer has a dedicated KWC website. The substitute is a universal English-language website that is not country-specific.

The information it provides about its faucets is incomplete but reasonably adequate.

The short description of each faucet and the single 3/4 view image presented on the KWC website is all that is presented in the actual listing.

The more detailed technical data and installation instruction sheets are contained in downloadable documents in which all dimensions are in metric.

The documents are in several formats: .pdf, .xml, and .eps, so you will need to have several applications installed to display them all.

CAD drawings are available in five formats, including a 3D CAD model in the universal format, .dxf. The drawings are of no particular help to the buyer, but useful to architects and planners.

The information about the faucet in the technical documents is extensive including installation ("mounting") instructions (in twelve languages), an exploded parts diagram, and a dimensioned drawing (in metric) to help you decide whether a faucet will fit your sink.

The faucets are not adequately illustrated with several views to make visualization easier. A single 3/4 view is not enough. Multiple images in color, or, better yet, a 360^° viewing feature such as that used by faucets, that allows the mouse to rotate the faucet to any viewing angle, would be invaluable in fully visualizing the faucet.

Where to Buy

KWC faucets in North America were handled by Franke Kitchen Systems in the U.S. That ended in 2022 with KWC's divorce from Franke.

The brand's former distributor in Canada, Nor­tes­co, Inc. is out of business. Some of its product lines were purchased and are serviced by Stream­line Can­ada, but these did not include KWC.

The two current sources in North Amer­ica are Forté Brands and Chi­ca­go Fau­cet Shoppe.

The Forté Group

Formed in 2001, Forté is a buying group composed of upscale decorative kitchen and bath showrooms. It is the largest buying group of its kind, with about 200 members representing some 500 showrooms spaced across the U.S. and Can­ada.

Bathroom Brands Group, Ltd. a British company trading in the U.S. as Crosswater London entered the North Amer­ican market in 2016 by partnering with Forté to sell Crass­wa­ter products. The partnership gave Cross­wa­ter instant access to a distribution network that otherwise would have taken years to develop and has contributed materially to its success in the North Amer­ican market.

In 2024 Crosswater added KWC kitchen faucets,(but not bath faucets) to the brands it sells through the hundreds of Forté showrooms.

Odds are there is a Forté-affiliated showroom near you. To find a showroom, the Group provides a Find a Showroom page to help locate showrooms by zip code or address.

The faucets are identified as Crosswater KWC faucets on the Group's public website, ForteBrands.com.

If there is no showroom near you, you will be invited to shop over the Internet directly with Forté Brands in Milford, MA.

Whether you buy through the website or a showroom, do not expect a drastic price reduction from Forté's suggested retail price. The company enforces a minimum advertised price (MAP) policy that prohibits advertising a price more than 30% below its list price.

Crosswater offers its own product warranty that includes KWC faucets. The warranty is analyzed in our Crosswater Report and will not be repeated here.

Chicago Faucet Shoppe

The Chicago Faucet Shoppe sells both KWC kitchen and bath faucets and KWC replacement parts.

A search on "KWC faucets" produced a list of 10,086 products. Most of these are parts, of course. The range of parts extends back to the very first KWC products sold in North America.

The KWC Warranty

Chicago Faucet Shoppe will replace any faucet that is defective on delivery. But, for long-term protection, you will have to rely on the KWC warranty.

KWC does not have a warranty specific to faucets. Its warranty is a general product warranty. It is poorly written. Our panel of warranty lawyers, having parsed the wording sentence by sentence, is still not entirely sure what it guarantees or for how long.

It appears to include faucets as one of the "all products" to which the warranty applies. It covers purchases made after January 1, 2003, and installed in a private residence.

That warranty extends to the original buyer and continues for as long as the product remains in its original installation. We take that to mean a lifetime warranty that expires when the faucet has been moved from its original location. There is no requirement that a faucet continue to be owned by the originalpurchaser for the warranty to remain in effect – a rather odd omission.

Read the KWC warranty.

Chrome finishes "carry a limited lifetime warranty, all other finishes are warranted for five (5) years."

The warranty does not comply with the minimum requirements of the federal Mag­nu­son-Moss War­ranty Act (15 U.S.C. §2308) which governs the form and content of consumer product warranties in the U.S. Of the six things that must be included in a product warranty, KWC misses most of them.

We will not list all of the legal defects in the KWC warranty, but here are the highlights:

Federal Law Violations

• Improper Exclusions: KWC seeks to exclude certain consequential and incidental damages arising from a defective faucet with this language:

  "This warranty does not allow recovery of incidental or consequential damages such as loss of use, delay, property damage or other consequential damage, and KWC accepts no liability for such damages"

  However, for this exclusion to be effective, it must also include the following required qualifying statement:

  "Some States do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you."

  Without the qualifying statement, the attempt to exclude consequential or incidental damages is void and without effect. (16 CFR § 701.3(8))

• Illegal Disclaimer: Mag­nu­son-Moss, in very explicit language, prohibits a company that provides a written warranty from rejecting (law­yers say "disclaim" – a word that should never be used in a consumer warranty) state law implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. (15 U.S.C. § 2308 (a))

• KWC's attempted disclaimer contained in the following language (in all caps so you can't miss it) is illegal:

  "KWC DISCLAIMS ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR AS PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

• If KWC wants to sell its fau­cets "as is" – free of the state-law implied warranties – then it must first get rid of its written warranty, something it is probably not going to do.

• Written seller warranties are intended by Mag­nu­son-Moss to supplement implied warranties. They are "in addition to" not "in lieu of."

• So the language in the KWC warranty that seeks to substitute the KWC written warranty for state law implied warranties has no legal effect whatsoever.

• Deceptive Language: A worse problem with the disclaimer language is that it is deceptive.

• An average consumer (and even an average lawyer not familiar with Magnuson-Moss) could easily be misled into believing that he or she no longer has access to the protection of state-law warranties.

• Such deception is expressly prohibited by Magnuson-Moss which requires a warranty be written in

• "… words or phrases which would not mislead a reasonable, average consumer as to the nature or scope of the warranty." (15 U.S.C. § 2302 (a) (13))

• We doubt the misrepresentation is deliberate. Whoever wrote the provision simply did not understand its consequences. But, deception does not need to be deliberate to have consequences under Mag­nu­son-Moss.

• The law imposes a duty of reasonable care on a company providing a written warranty …

• "…to make the warranty not misleading." (15 U.S.C. §2310(c)(2))

• Although the statutory language is awkward, its meaning is crystal clear and the very presence of the provision in the KWC warranty evidences a lack of reasonable care and, therefore, culpable deception.

In any court challenge to KWC's warranty or warranty claim practices, the company will not only lose for failing to adhere to the dictates of Mag­nu­son-Moss but will end up paying the consumer's attorney fees and may have to pay a hefty penalty as exemplary or punitive damages for deception.

This warranty very badly needs rewriting by a competent warranty lawyer to directly and honestly state the company's warranty in a manner that complies with U.S. warranty law.

Provisions That Lack Business Sense

Other provisions in the warranty are legal, but we think they lack common business sense and reflect poorly on the company.

For example, consumers are required to send any defective parts back to KWC at their own expense.

This is penny-foolishness taken to an extreme. It saves the company a few pennies in shipping but exacts an enormous cost in goodwill.

A consumer already more than a little irritated by a broken faucet is not going to be less annoyed by having to pony up for shipping even though the amount is small. It is an excellent way to lose a customer for life, not to mention his family, friends, neighbors, and the folks in the carpool.

Customer Service

KWC's customer service for faucets sold by Forté Group members is handled by the Group.

However, for any faucet purchased before 2024, service is handled through email by KWC at ws-service.us@kwc.com or kwc-service.us@kwc.com (depending on whom you ask) from Switzerland. Understandably, service by email from across the Big Blue Pond is much slower than by telephone from the U.S. If your KWC faucet is not working, waiting days or weeks for the needed parts can be a major annoyance.

It is better than having no customer service at all but just barely.

KWC's response to warranty claims in the past has not always been helpful. The lack of helpfulness is usually due to KWC's claims policies. For example, while the ceramic cartridge warranty is for the lifetime of the faucet, service agents have evidently been instructed to treat any failure in a cartridge over five years old as due to "ordinary wear and tear", and deny warranty coverage.

While we don't expect cartridges to last forever, any certified cartridge should last far longer than five years before ordinary wear and tear takes its toll. If KWC cartridges actually do wear out after just five years, perhaps KWC should consider buying better valve cartridges.

We don't know if these policies will continue under the new owners.

Testing & Certification

Comparable Faucets

Faucets comparable to KWC include:

All of these companies offer a stronger warranty and many sell faucets of the same Nordic-Hanseatic design within the same price range. Two of them, are in our list of Best Value Faucets. In2aqua has one of the strongest warranties in the faucet industry.

Continuing Research

We are continuing to research the company. If you have experience with KWC faucets, good, bad, or indifferent, we would like to hear about it, so please contact us or post a comment below.