The bathroom is often regarded as a home’s hideaway. Designers often outfit the small space with expensive slabs of Carrara marble in soothing shades of white, and, in what is usually one of the home's smallest spaces, even the room’s tiniest details, like the faucet and showerhead, are not overlooked. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, a select group of homeowners are shelling out massive amounts of cash to upgrade common plastic water fixtures to products that are dipped in lustrous materials, such as gold or bronze, and contain top-of-the-line technology that delivers on-demand massages while mimicking real rain.

These features don't come cheap. Many are the result of years of research on the different ways a showerhead can transport water from the pipe to your body in the most lavish way possible. Add that onto the price of precious metals and laborious handcrafted techniques, and you’ll have yourself a showerhead that nearly inches into the tens of thousands.

The Real Rain in action. Photo: Courtesy of Kohler

"When you pay for a pricey showerhead, you’re buying a well-designed product that creates an experience," says Mark Bickerstaffe, Kohler’s director of new product development. "That experience could be a massage. We know water therapy works, but only if you achieve a certain pressure on a particular point of the skin in a cyclical pattern. Translating that criteria into a showerhead’s technology costs money not only in the research and development phases but also during the manufacturing process.”

Kohler’s latest invention, Real Rain, which starts at $2,150, mimics the feeling of a summer storm. After studying what makes rain feel like rain, Kohler’s team of experts concluded that the droplets vary in size and fall in a slightly irregular pattern. To encourage water to come out of the showerhead’s chamber like a raindrop through the sky, Kohler peppered the product’s surface with 775 concave nozzles in different sizes and added a deluge function. In a press of a button, the showerhead drenches you with a flush of water that’s held in the pipe, imitating a monsoon.