As the countdown to Kitchen and Bath Show 2026 begins, we’re spotlighting exhibitor Avenir Design. As a Sydney-based specialist with 25 years of expertise, Avenir designs and engineers premium heated towel rails and bathroom accessories, prioritising meticulous technical detail and direct, expert support for every product. Read on to discover their current design trends, and what you can expect to find at their stand.
Can you give us a brief introduction to your brand?
Avenir is an Australian designer and manufacturer of heated towel rails and bathroom accessories. We’ve been doing this from Sydney for 25 years, and in that time we’ve stayed deliberately specialist, heated rails and the accessories that go with them, nothing else.
What that focus has given us is the room to think carefully about every part of the product. The visible design, of course, but also the parts most people never see: the electrical system, the installation hardware, and the way a replacement part gets to a customer six years after they bought the rail. We design and engineer all of it ourselves, here, and we answer the phone when someone calls, including, on many days, the designer of the product itself.
What differentiates your brand from other competitors in the market?
A few things, and they all come back to the same idea, that a heated towel rail should actually do what it’s meant to do, safely and for a long time.
The most concrete differentiator is our electrical system. Every rail in our range runs on 24-volt low voltage with a DC driver, which is genuinely safer in a wet area than 240VAC systems. Our driver is also way more reliable than the 12V halogen or wire-wound transformers most of the category still uses; we haven’t had a driver failure in five years of production, which is part of why we can offer a 25-year warranty across the whole system, including the transformer. Most of our competitors offer a 12-month warranty on their transformers.
Beyond that, we’re an Australian manufacturer, with components stocked locally and standard finishes shipping inside a week. And the kit you open contains everything you need to install it, with QR-linked video walkthroughs for the trades doing the work.
None of those things is a marketing claim. There are consequences of staying small, staying focused, and being willing to engineer the unglamorous parts properly.
Are there any exciting trends that you are seeing in the world of design this year?
The shift toward electric is the big one. As gas comes out of bathrooms in new builds and renovations, hydronic rails are giving way to electric, and regulators in several markets are now pushing for timed control as standard. That’s a good thing; there’s no reason a rail should draw power once a towel is dry, which is generally about 4 hours.
We’ve been arguing for intelligent timing for a long time, but the honest truth is that most timer solutions on the market are clunky enough that people don’t bother using them. They default to leaving the rail on, or switching it off and forgetting to switch it back on before they want a warm towel. Neither is a great outcome.
The other shift, which is quieter but real, is that designers and their clients are asking harder questions about where products come from and what’s inside them. Australian manufacturing is increasingly something clients ask for by name, and that’s a conversation we’re glad to be part of.
What can our visitors expect to see and experience on your stand at Kitchen and Bath Show? Any new launches?
Two launches, and they’re both meaningful.
The first is i-On, our intelligent control system for heated rails. It does what good timer technology should have been doing for years: integrated temperature control, a repeating morning and evening schedule, an adjustable built-in night light, and app integration over Bluetooth Low Energy with no pairing or Wi-Fi setup required. The interface is the part we’re most proud of: it’s actually simple to use, which sounds like a low bar, but in this category it isn’t.
The second is something we’re not quite ready to name yet. The heated rail category has been defined for decades by two heating methods, hydronic and dry element. We’re introducing a third, which fundamentally changes how a rail heats. We’ll have it on the stand, and we’d rather show people in person than describe it on paper.
What are you looking forward to the most at Kitchen and Bath Show 2026?
Honestly, the conversations. We design for a community of people, architects, designers, specifiers, the trades who install our products, and the homeowners who live with them, and a show like this is one of the few moments where all of those people are in one place at the same time.
We learn the most when someone tells us what hasn’t worked for them, or what they wish a heated rail could do. A lot of what’s on our stand this year started as a comment from someone at a previous event. So: come and find us, tell us what you think, and tell us what’s missing. That’s the part we’re looking forward to.
You can meet Avenir Design (Stand #1406) at Kitchen and Bath Show from 11-13 June 2026, at ICC Sydney, register to attend today!
