This door has two handles so the kids can not escape from the nursery. It is actually a really nice safety solution. I haven’t seen such doors in other countries; only here in UK.
The lower handle is low enough for children while the upper one is in the head level of a grownup (170 cm). The door can be opened by an grownup using both hands or collaboratively with a child.
In Austria and Germany we do have a lots of those. And although I completely understand your critics they work without any troubles here. This is because we do not have a common standard where cold is on the right side and hot on the left. This quasi-standard is commonly known and used.
So this faucet is perfectly usable by local people although I understand the irritation of people coming from countries where they do not have any common standard at all (like USA) or another one.
There IS a convention (albeit not a standard) that hot water should be on the left. The reasoning behind is (keep in mind the separated taps):
– most people are right handed and reach for the right tap first and it not being hot could prevent injuries,
– the left one is also harder to operate (right handed majority) which could prevent e.g. children from scalding themselves and
– visually impaired always expect the hot water on the left.
With mixed taps above the first reason may not make much sense, although it’s still easier to turn the handle to the right than to the left with the right hand. With many mixer taps the hot water also runs on the inside so the spout does not get hot. Mixing the tubes can result in hot spout :).
I would imagine that the majority of the world follows the above convention.
The problem with the above type of a mixer tap is that when first encountered, many people don’t know how to operate it. This might seam strange, but it’s true and I’ve seen it myself. What makes it intuitive that lifting the handle will result in running water?!?!? Unfortunately nothing. What makes it intuitive that turning the handle left and right will change the temperature?!?!? Hiding the temperature indicators under the handle makes this even worse.
Saying this, these taps have the advantage that can be easily operated with one hand only, while the other one checks the water temperature. And are my favourite type of taps!