New Kohler Experience Center Provides Immersive Product Testing

Kohler launched its latest retail concept—the Kohler Experience Center—in New York’s Flatiron District May 24. The platform focuses on providing a truly experiential product opportunity for design pros and consumers.

The 10,000-square-foot Experience Center features 20 kitchen and bath vignettes for design inspiration and fully functioning displays that allow for product testing across showers, tubs, sinks, and toilets. It also includes a private bathing space for deeply immersive interaction with the company’s Real Rain shower panel, DTV+ digital showering system, VibrAcoustic hydrotherapy, and other shower systems, as well as intelligent toilets.

Along with product browsing, designers can take advantage of Kohler’s specification service, with in-house/in-person support and by-appointment video-conferencing to assist with complex plumbing projects in the U.S. and across the globe.

“We recognized a tremendous need across the industry for a deeper knowledge and insight into how our products work,” says Larry Yuen, president of Kohler's global Kitchen & Bath Group. “From a plumbing perspective, the products that work in a bathroom in Milan are acutely different from those that need to work in a hotel in Dubai, for instance. Our goal with the KEC is to provide design professionals with both the ability to source and resolve all plumbing needs on a global scale from any KEC location.”

The New York space is the first of nine planned Kohler Experience Centers; London, Los Angeles, Singapore, Shanghai, and other international locales are scheduled to open later this year.