It gives you the functionality you need to fill your bath, plus a look that can make a statement or sit quietly in the background, depending on the style you choose.
This guide will help you know what to look for when choosing a freestanding tap, from matching it to your bath to making sure everything performs once it's fitted.
What makes a tap freestanding?
A freestanding tap bolts straight into the floor beside the bath, rather than fixing to the tub's rim or the wall behind it.
Hot and cold pipework runs beneath the floor and rises through the tap's own column, so there's nothing left on show but the tap itself.
That's also what gives the bath its freedom. With nothing fixed to a wall, the bath can move into the room. Maybe take a spot facing the light, or become the centrepiece of a bigger space.
Most freestanding taps come with a shower handset built in as standard, connected by a flexible hose. A small diverter valve on the tap body decides whether the water goes to the spout or the handset.
Switching between them is as simple as turning the valve, useful for rinsing shampoo out of your hair or cleaning the bath afterwards.
Getting the style right
A tap's style comes down to two things, the shape of the column and the handles fitted to it.
Some columns curve gently from base to spout, others run straight to the floor, and each looks entirely different once it's standing next to a bath.
Handles carry just as much of the character. A single lever gives a tap a cleaner, more modern line, while a crosshead design, the traditional four-spoked kind you turn rather than push, pulls it toward a period feel.
Our Butler & Rose Beatrice freestanding tap leans fully into that traditional line, with crosshead controls that have barely changed in a century of use and a telephone-style cradle for the shower handset.
Go modern and the details shift. The Koko freestanding mixer tap swaps crossheads for a single fluted lever that is textured enough to grip properly with wet hands.
While the Vellamo Twist adds a swivel spout that turns out of the way once the bath's filled, useful if you don't want it overhanging the tub while you're in it.
None of this locks you into keeping the same style throughout the room. A traditional tap can sit just as naturally beside a sharp-edged modern bath as it does beside a roll-top, and the reverse works too.
Proportion counts alongside style. A thinner, more slender column can disappear next to a long, low bath, while a heavily detailed tap can crowd a plain one and pull focus away from the bath itself.
Whether you already have your bath in place or you know which bath you are planning on, looking at the two side by side before deciding can help more than picking the tap on its own.
Choosing a finish
What a tap is made from decides how well it copes with years of water and steam. Brass and stainless steel both hold their structure well, resisting pitting and dulling even under daily use. Zinc alloy and stainless steel are also two good options.
The finish sits on top of that material, and it’s what changes how a tap looks and how much upkeep it needs day to day.
Chrome throws light back into the room, which does real work in a bathroom that only gets natural light from one small window.
It also picks up glimpses of whatever's nearby, a mirror frame, a towel rail, the light overhead, in a way a duller finish won’t give you.
A matt finish holds onto that light instead, giving the tap a quieter presence and a softer look from across the room.
Matt black shows marks the most of all, so it's best suited to a bathroom where wiping it down more regularly is already part of the routine. Brushed nickel sits in between, softer than chrome and better at hiding a splash, but without matt black's daily upkeep.
The finish also has a temperature feel to it. Brass and bronze sit at the warm end, with brushed nickel and gunmetal at the cool side.
Our Crosswater MPRO takes that further still. Unlacquered brass will change colour on purpose, darkening gradually over months of use instead of staying exactly as bright and polished as the day it arrived. It is also available in chrome and matt carbon black.
Mixing metals with confidence
Whatever finish you choose has to share the room with what's already there. It helps to think about the room as a whole rather than the freestanding tap on its own.
Most bathrooms already carry more than one metal, in the shower head, the towel rail or maybe the mirror over the vanity. So a tap chosen in isolation can end up fighting everything around it.
The easier route is picking one finish to lead and letting the others sit behind it.
A brushed brass tap with matt black accessories can feel warm with an edge. Chrome throughout works just as well, especially lifted by a single fitting like a brass towel rail as the room's one warm note.
Temperature is the other half of the equation. Pairing a cool tone against a warm one tends to feel more balanced than two cool or two warm finishes together.
Matching height and reach to your bath
Height and reach are two different measurements, and it helps to know which is which before you start comparing taps.
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Height is how tall the tap stands, measured from the floor to the top of the spout.
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Reach, usually labelled "projection" on a product page, is how far the spout then extends out from the tap's base into the bath.
Height and reach differ from one freestanding tap to the next, by design rather than by accident.
Some stand compact and close to the floor, others are taller, each one designed around a different bath and a different look.
There's no single number that works for every bathroom, so take time to explore the descriptions and specifications of the taps that catch your eye, to see what works for your space.
Do you have enough water pressure?
A freestanding tap pushes water further than most bathroom fittings. It needs to travel up through a tall column rather than out through a low spout sitting right beside the pipework.
Weak water pressure shows up fast here. Your bath will be slow to fill and your water will struggle to hold a steady temperature.
A combi boiler is usually pressurised enough to cope with that extra height without any changes needed.
A gravity-fed system, with a cold tank in the loft, is the one more likely to need a booster pump. That comes down to how much drop there is between the tank and the bathroom, not how far away it sits.
Every tap lists a minimum pressure rating on its product page, measured in bar, the same unit your home's water pressure is measured in. That figure will be different between models depending on what they need to work at their best.
At Tap Warehouse, our freestanding taps run from 0.2 bar minimum pressure up to 3 bar for the Crosswater MPRO tap for example, so it's worth checking that detail in the product description before you order.
A pressure gauge can tell you your home's static water pressure without needing to call anyone in. They are not expensive to buy from most plumbing suppliers, and mean you can check whether the tap you want will fill the way it's supposed to once it's in your bathroom.
Timing the plumbing before the floor goes down
Height, finish and pressure can all be worked out before anything's fitted, but none of it matters if the pipework isn't in the right spot.
The pipes for a freestanding tap need to come up through the floor at one exact point, so they're put in place while the floor's still open, before any final flooring goes down.
That's true whether the bathroom's having a full renovation or just having a tap added to it.
When that is in place, it is the design and finish of your tap that you'll be looking at every day, whether that is curved or straight, warm brass or cool chrome.
Our freestanding tap range includes finishes from slate and gunmetal to brushed stainless steel and chrome, with styles spanning traditional right the way through to modern looks.
Take a look and find a tap you'll still love long after the water's stopped running.
