Deconstruction 13 – Bathroom Beauty

When I look back on our project, it’s funny what I see, and how my thought process worked from the start. The bathrooms seem to have been my focus, I am not sure why?!

As we were growing up, the bathroom became a place we would sit for hours and chat, our little sanctuary of calm. There was never a lock on the door. This might be a little strange to some, but to us, we loved it. Mam would sit in the bath and us on our towel box. She would ask us about our day, our friends and discuss all the different elements of our lives. We laughed and cried more times in our perched positions!

A social worker friend of mine once told me that it was a very clever idea because there were no barriers between us as our mother lay in the bath and we chatted to her….in a way mam allowed us to be on the same level, exposed if you will! They are times I treasure, and things I have taken with me into our own home.

The very first item I bought for the house, a bath! This came from an architectural salvage yard in Kilkenny, Eurosalve, a treasure trove of some of the best of antiques.

We have two bathrooms, upstairs with the bath and shower and our downstairs with just the shower. My love of the bath is about equal to my husband’s love for a powerful shower!

Our second purchase, a bright orange dressing table that we repurposed for our sinks in the second bathroom. Our design for the second bathroom revolved solely around this unit. With something so bright, we needed to ensure that everything else we chose complimented this. Simple white tiles with a fleck of marble through them with a turquoise tile in the shower, we just couldn’t resist. Sourcing tiles became one of my favourite elements of shopping for the bathroom, there was so many choices and one of the best places was Best Tile in Waterford.

Lighting in both bathrooms was fundamental to get right. For the bath, I wanted to create an atmosphere, to relax and unwind, have the chat. Here we focused on hidden lighting, uplighting a small apex roof over the bath and background lighting at the shower to allow for that tranquil, calming space. For function, I have two wall lights at the mirror over the sink and one downlight. We did not want to drown the bathroom in light, just where it is needed.

For the shower room, we had the opportunity to be more playful with the lighting as we have quite a high ceiling. I had originally thought to uplight this but once I had picked the tile for the shower, that changed. It was going to downlight the shower area. Again, we went with two wall lights on either side of the mirrors, and to highlight the height of the room, we added two pendants. These hang close together, one a little lower than the other, drawing the eye down. I have three different scenes I can now set in that room, but my go-to is highlighting the tile and making the turquoise colour pop with the foreground, the orange unit.

I’m very lucky to have two bathrooms that give me two different dynamics demanding on the mood, calm or colour!