From a spare bedroom to an Irvine headquarters.

Rohl, which styles its name ROHL, is a family story before it is a corporate one. A profile in the Orange County Business Journal published on 26 November 2006 traced the business to Ken Rohl, who had worked for a plumbing company in Chicago before deciding to go out on his own. At a trade show in Germany, the paper reported, he spotted a faucet with a hose that came out of the spout, and he invited its Swiss makers to meet the executives of the company he then worked for. The venture he built around that kind of product started, according to the same article, in a second bedroom.

The company dates the brand to 1983. A press release issued from Irvine, California, on 11 January 2022 spoke of “the inception of the ROHL brand in 1983”. The Business Journal followed the company as it moved: from its first home near the water in Newport Beach, to a building in Santa Ana in 1985, to larger premises in Costa Mesa in 1989, and then to a headquarters in Irvine, where it had settled shortly before the 2006 profile appeared.

The model behind the name was importing and specifying rather than casting metal. “Rohl doesn’t make anything itself,” the Business Journal wrote in 2006. The paper said the company had arrangements with factories in Western Europe, New Zealand, Canada and one in Los Angeles, where an artisan made an above-counter sink bowl for the brand. The design work and the relationships with makers were the business; the fittings themselves came from partner workshops.

The business became a family enterprise in the fullest sense. The same profile described three sons in senior roles. Louis (Lou) Rohl was chief operating officer and managing partner in Irvine; Mark Rohl led an Eastern division from New Jersey; and Greg Rohl was president of a Western division in San Francisco. The brothers, the paper reported, had agreed that Lou, who had the most experience working with the Swiss and European vendors, would succeed their father. The 2022 release says Lou Rohl began working with his father after the brand’s inception and became chief executive in 2011.

Fortune Brands, a house of names and the collections.

Ownership changed in 2016. English Wikipedia’s article on Fortune Brands lists the acquisition of Riobel in May 2016 and of Rohl and Perrin & Rowe in September 2016, followed by Victoria + Albert in October 2017, citing reports in Kitchen & Bath Design News and a Fortune Brands announcement of August 2016. Fortune Brands has owned Rohl since September 2016. The parent, now called Fortune Brands Innovations, is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, and also owns Moen; Wikipedia says its water business, formerly the Global Plumbing Group, is based in North Olmsted, Ohio.

From those purchases came a new masthead. The January 2022 release says Lou Rohl helped create House of Rohl US in 2018, after Rohl was acquired by Fortune Brands, and served as its chair and founder. The release listed the brands of the House of Rohl as ROHL, Riobel, Perrin & Rowe, Shaws and Victoria + Albert, and said Lou Rohl would retire on 28 February 2022 after nearly four decades in the kitchen and bath industry. It also recorded his work as an industry partner of the American Society of Interior Designers and as a member of the board of the National Kitchen & Bath Association.

The group website places the family name over a set of national stories. The House of Rohl says Riobel originated in Quebec, that Perrin & Rowe faucets are crafted in England, that Shaws fireclay sinks have been made in England since 1897, and that Victoria + Albert baths are crafted in South Africa. Its brand menu in October 2026 also listed the hardware names Emtek and Schaub, and it ran regional websites for the United States, Canada, Europe and China.

Within that portfolio the ROHL line is organised by named collections for kitchen and bath. Among those listed on the group site in October 2026 were Lombardia, Pirellone, Apothecary and Acqui. The site also presented a Modelle collection credited to the furniture and interior designer Xander Noori; the company says it took its cue from the haute couture runways of Milan and Paris, with linear surfaces that play with shadow and light. Italian place names and European references run through the catalogue, echoing the European sourcing on which the brand was founded.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make faucets and bath fittings: the taps, spouts, shower valves, drains and accessories that sit at the most visible points of a kitchen or bathroom. Brands in this trade sit at many different points in it, from family firms that still carry a founder’s outlook to names that now belong to much larger building-products groups, and a single brand may be sold through specialist showrooms, trade counters, home centres or online.

A fittings brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single logo than by a set of finishes, a catalogue of named collections and the shapes of its handles and spouts, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fittings are actually made and finished.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its range has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand told through sourcing, family and collection names.

Rohl presents itself as a curator as much as a maker. The founding story the Orange County Business Journal told in 2006 is about recognising a product at a German trade show and building relationships with Swiss and European workshops; the brand’s identity followed from that act of selection. The House of Rohl now puts the idea into a line of its own, saying it seeks faucets and fixtures of authentic luxury, and it frames the group under the phrase “The Story of A Life Well Crafted”.

The visual language of the brand leans on place. Collection names such as Lombardia and Pirellone point to northern Italy, and the group’s description of its sister brands is a map: Quebec for Riobel, England for Perrin & Rowe and Shaws, South Africa for Victoria + Albert. Each is presented with its own origin, while the ROHL name sits above them as the umbrella. The capitalised wordmark, ROHL, carries the family surname into every one of those settings.

The family thread is the brand’s longest. Ken Rohl started the business; his sons ran divisions on both coasts; Lou Rohl led it as chief executive from 2011, saw it through the September 2016 sale to Fortune Brands, and helped shape the House of Rohl in 2018 before retiring in February 2022. Ownership now sits with a Deerfield, Illinois parent that also owns Moen, but the group still trades under the founding family’s surname, and its 2022 release was dated from Irvine, California.

For a design guide, Rohl shows how a brand built on sourcing and specification can make provenance and family name the core of its identity, then extend that name over a portfolio of other houses. Compare the mass-market faucet brand under the same owner in our Moen brand guidelines and another Southern California brass maker in our Newport Brass brand guidelines. For this guide we use bronze ink, unlacquered brass, marble grey and porcelain with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Rohl’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.