When GROHE returns to ExCeL London this November for the sixth consecutive year, it arrives carrying a piece of Milan with it. The brand’s showcase at HIX 2026, the hotel design event staging its first European edition on the 25th and 26th, folds the theatrical grandeur of Milan Design Week into a single stand built around water, wellness, and the quiet engineering of the modern bathroom. The timing reads as intention rather than coincidence: under this year’s exhibition theme, ‘Changes,’ GROHE is arguing that the room long treated as purely functional has become hospitality’s most emotionally charged space.
That argument lands at a venue in transition. What began as HIX LDN has evolved this year into HIX Europe, decamping to a connected, campus-style setting at ExCeL that expects to draw more than 5,000 hospitality design professionals across two days. This year’s theme, ‘Changes,’ asks how the industry is rethinking the way spaces are designed, used and experienced, a question GROHE answers by treating the bathroom as a site of ritual rather than utility. For a brand that has exhibited here six years running, the larger European stage offers a wider audience for a proposition GROHE has been refining in public since it first revitalised the collection in 2023.
At the heart of the presentation sits GROHE SPA, the premium sub-brand developed with the LIXIL Global Design team, whose name carries a quiet piece of etymology: SPA draws from Salus Per Aquam, Latin for health through water. Visitors will not simply look at the collection but handle it, moving through working demonstrations and tactile displays conceived to foreground the three qualities GROHE now wants bound up with luxury: design excellence, innovation, and conscious water use. It is a framing the brand has carried from exhibition to exhibition, the belief that water is less a resource to dispense than an elixir around which a daily ritual can be designed.
The showcase organises itself around the GROHE SPA AquaTree, a 3D-printed showering piece the brand positions less as a fitting than as an object of feeling. First unveiled this spring, when GROHE SPA transformed Milan’s Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato into an immersive ‘Aqua Sanctuary,’ the AquaTree suspends from above in a fluid, organic silhouette that appears grown rather than made, challenging the reflexive assumption of what a shower should look like. Reimagining bathroom fittings to create emotional connection is, in GROHE’s telling, the entire premise. Water, in this reading, becomes a material of architecture rather than merely its plumbing.
Alongside it, GROHE will present newer arrivals that translate that ambition into pieces designers can actually specify. The Allure Gravity taps pair a slim, squared silhouette with interchangeable cover plates in Caesarstone quartz, glass, and mirrored finishes, a system built so a single fitting can be tuned to almost any interior scheme. The collection, which reached market in October, has already gathered industry recognition for its restraint. According to Patrick Speck, Leader of LIXIL Global Design, the line hands designers and their clients “the utmost freedom to bring their bathroom visions to life,” recasting customisation as a route to wellbeing rather than ornament. Even the engineering carries the message, with flow held to a sustainable 4.8 litres a minute.
Completing the stand, the new Grohtherm Aqua Tiles showers extend that logic of immersive control to the surface of the wall itself. Taken together, the pieces describe a thesis gathering force across beauty and wellness alike: that restoration is no longer something we travel to and schedule, but something built into the architecture of ordinary days. GROHE’s wager, carried from a Milan theatre to an East London dock, is that the home spa has quietly stopped being an indulgence and become the way we now expect to live.
