You can purchase a free-standing, floor-mounted clawfoot bathtub faucet. They are pricey, but should provide an attractive solution for you.

does your bathroom have another heat source? if not, i'd say i'd still want a heater for the odd chilly morning. my shower is in RI and having the ceiling heater (as well as the central heating) keeps us from having to turn up the heat for the whole second floor 'to get it to run' while showering.

Brizo is the more expensive line manufactured by Delta. I think the real difference would be in the styles offered as I found when selecting my shower fixtures that it was style and finish that was the differentiation. Delta makes high quality stuff - think of it as Honda versus Lexus :-) I am in California so shower fixtures are limited in flow. I wouldn't be surprised if brands were making all fixtures California compliant rather than manufacturing separate just for the California market. Do you have room for a free standing tub? They are nice when they are situated in a very large bathroom with room all around so they are freestanding but not very functional (at least to me) when they are set against a wall or walls since one then has to clean around limited spaces.

I had a "freestanding" tub in an apartment I rented in college - aka a bathroom so old that it had the original cast iron tub with legs. We had the kind of circular ring with a curtain and some kind of gerry rigged pipe with a shower head running up the wall and it was a complete failure as a shower for a variety of reasons - of course as poor college students we didn't expect optimum bathrooms 1) Shower itself was claustrophic because you were surrounding by a curtain inside a tiny circle 2) Shower didn't do much to contain water - shower floor regularly had so much water that it leaked into the ceiling of the kitchen below - not that we cared since we were renters. I imagine the walls next to the shower itself were also damaged from the water 3) Standing up in a freestanding tub is difficult and not safe. This is because the surface of the tub is sloped so there isn't much flat floor to stand on AND the floor itself tends to be slick and slippery - most people don't want to "rough" surface on the bottom of a tub How to you intend to prevent water from entering the seam where the tub meets the wall?