I Spotted This Kitchen Design Trend in Every TV Show Last Year…So Clearly, I Had to Steal It

Much like planning a wedding or having a baby, when you undergo a kitchen renovation, you suddenly become that insufferable person who can only view the world in relation to your “big life thing.” Somebody mention clean energy? You will sanctimoniously talk about your induction oven. Go to a friend’s house for coffee? You will take out a tape measurer and start measuring their breakfast bar.

So it was for me, when over the past six months, I compared every fictional kitchen I saw on TV to the one my husband and I were planning, making us freeze-frame on specific countertops, backsplashes and paneled dishwashers…you know, for research.

The one trend I saw again and again, that ultimately influenced my favorite thing in my new kitchen: pot fillers.

Pot fillers are hardly a new phenomenon. Essentially a faster-flowing faucet with a swinging arm that sits above your oven range, a pot filler is designed to, well, fill pots on your stovetop without you having to schlep them to and from the sink, and they’ve been a mainstay of traditional working kitchens for years.

But, as a student of the Nancy Meyers school of fantasy home decor, I had never noticed them in TV or movie kitchens before. Elaborate hoods, floor-to-ceiling tile and impractical open shelves? Sure. But pot fillers? Not until 2022, when the cup began to, ahem, runneth over.

First, we had Charlotte’s Upper East Side French farmhouse dream in And Just Like That, which saw a stainless steel pot filler above her Wolf Double Range (which retails for $16,000, in case you were wondering). Then there was the modern brass number mounted against a heavenly marble backsplash in Inventing Anna (ostensibly in a New York townhouse, owned by a wealthy character who likely doesn’t zip her own zippers, let alone fill her own pots).

My obsession reached full steam (sorry) by the time we got to The Watcher, a spooky-campy Ryan Murphy whodunnit that’s actually 100 percent about New Jersey real estate. There, we watch an increasingly unraveled Bobby Cannavale making his patented homemade tomato sauce, but apparently not boiling any water using his venetian bronze pot filler, which nicely coordinates with the matte black faucet on the island sink. (I have thoughts about the inexplicable black grout between the stacked zellige tile…but I digress.)

At this point, I had already established with my contractor that if it was good enough for Naomi Watts and Kristen Davis, it was good enough for me (also my husband…the one who does 95 percent of the cooking). And I had learned that it would require moving a plumbing line (which we were already doing) and a $300 to $1,500 investment in the fixture itself, all of which makes pot fillers a pricey, though not entirely prohibitive kitchen addition.

But even as our plumber got to work, the hits kept on coming. There was Dead to Me. There was Fleishman is in Trouble. There was, honest-to-god, Harry and Meghan smooching in front of one in the Netflix docuseries. It wasn’t just me, right? This was a thing? And was this thing, which I was now drilling into my kitchen wall, simply a passing a fad?

Well, I am now two months into pot filler ownership, and I can say, with confidence, that fads may come and go, but the gold faucet protruding from under my oven hood is forever. I love using it to fill big stock pots. I love using it to add a splash of water to a stir fry. I love that it feels like a little jewel on my wall, a conversation piece and natural focal point. And if it makes me feel a tiny bit like Charlotte York, so be it.