Shower niches go in first
A tiled shower is waterproofed and then tiled, and the tiling is the part everyone chooses. What decides whether the shower works is the layer underneath, and the awkward places in that layer are the ones with a change of direction in them.
A bench has a top, a front and two ends. A niche is a hole in a wall with a sill that has to shed water. A curb is a threshold the water has to be stopped at. Each is a place where a waterproof membrane has to turn corners, and each is easier to get right as a made component than as something formed on site.
Floating benches
Most of the benches here are floating: they are carried on a bracket fixed to the wall rather than standing on the shower floor. That leaves the floor continuous underneath, with nothing to tile around and nothing sitting in the water.
It also changes how the shower looks and how it is cleaned, since there is no junction between bench and floor. For a shower with a solid stone base, where the point is a floor with no joints in it, a floating bench is the version that keeps that intact. The stone shower bases page covers those.
Matching a niche kit to the system
The bench kits here come in versions built for different waterproofing systems: Schluter Kerdi, wedi, GoBoard and orange waterproof board among them. The bench is the same idea in each case, and what changes is the board and the way it is meant to be sealed.
That is the thing to get right when ordering. The kit should match the system the rest of the shower is being waterproofed with, because mixing systems is exactly where the responsibility for a failure becomes unclear. Whoever is building the shower will normally have already chosen a system.
Niches, shelves and curbs
Niches come as preformed boxes that are set into the wall and waterproofed in, replacing a recess framed and lined on site. Shelves are smaller, often corner pieces, for a shower that has no wall depth to give away.
A curb is the raised threshold at the opening, and it is supplied here as a waterproof board component rather than built from masonry. It is one of the quieter items in the range and one of the more consequential, since it is the line the water is being asked not to cross.
Shower conversion kits
Some of the range is sold as conversion kits at set footprints, intended for replacing an existing tub or tray with a tiled shower. They bundle the components for that footprint rather than leaving each to be specified separately.
The value there is in the parts agreeing with one another without anyone having to check. Every piece in a kit belongs to one system and one dimension set, which is the same result a careful specifier reaches by choosing components individually, arrived at in one step instead of several.
Choosing niches and benches
The method, the sealing details and what a specific shower requires are the province of the installer and of the system manufacturer, not of a product page. What can be settled here is which components the shower will have and which system they belong to.
Those two decisions are usually made before the tile is chosen, which is why this range sits at the start of a bathroom project, not at the end of one. The stone shower bases and shower systems pages cover what goes in after it.
