Designer’s Bathroom Reno
Who doesn’t love a good sneak peak into a designer’s home? We design lots of spaces for other people, but what do ours look like? Glad you asked! First up, we’ll take a look at Emily’s bathroom reno in her Montreal condo that she completed in 2020!
We want to dive into some of the ins and outs of her design process, how budget played a factor in decisions, and how she came to the final design of this beautiful bathroom! With all projects, we have to begin with the existing site. Nothing like a good before + after photo to get things started!
The Before:
A few things to mention about the existing bathroom space that impacted the design:
You may have noticed that the shower is elevated more than usual. The reason why is because the condo has concrete slab floors. This means plumbing can’t be run through the structure of the concrete, so they created these “pedestals” that the plumbing can run through. The toilet is also plumbed from the wall and not the floor for the same reason!
The room has grand 11’ high ceilings. Amazing for spacial volume, tricky for lighting!
The layout was very functional as it was, so there wasn’t any need to rework the space.
The Design Process:
We, as designers, go through a very similar design process as our clients! Trust us, we know how hard it can be to envision and plan a new space! A great starting point is to head to the Google and start searching for things you like and don’t like! We start all of our projects with our clients this way to flush out the good, the bad and the ugly!
Once you have some ideas, you need to translate them into your space. Not all things you see work together and sometimes the idea just doesn’t work in the space at all! This is the time to plug working with a designer! It’s our job to help curate a space and sort through all of the design possibilities! There are so many different ways to involve a designer in the process and it’s our unbiased opinion that it’s always worth it in the end!
Back to the bathroom design! When in doubt - draw it out! By doing a rough sketch, it helped Emily see the scale of the revisions that needed to be made. This sketch is actually from the editing stage of the design process, so let’s just get into the details of how and why this space came together the way it did!
Design Round 1
Start with a space plan. This is a critical step in understanding the limitations of the space. Overall, the layout of the bathroom worked, so the design focused on adding some functional details and giving the space an aesthetic upgrade that it so badly needed!
The counter space in the existing bathroom was lacking, so the intention was to add a prefab vanity with wall sconces and an oversized mirror. She also wanted to add glazing to enclose the shower and incorporate a central ceiling mounted rain shower head and built in bench. It’s important to note these intensions, because they are things that needed to change as the design progressed!
Refining The Design
This phase in design can be a process of additions AND subtractions. The decision was made to leave all of the plumbing fixtures in their existing locations to save on the overall cost of the renovation. This meant that the sink was going to be offset, so a prefab vanity no longer worked. It also meant that the mirror was going to be offset and 2 sconces wouldn’t be an option. Now her rough sketch from above is making more sense, isn’t it??
She also decided to keep the wall mounted shower, but upgrade to a rain shower head. Having the water directed straight down allowed her to use a prefab, partial glass divider instead of fully enclosing the shower. The initial design required a dropped ceiling for the new plumbing and the cost of the glazing just didn’t make sense since this wasn’t their forever home.
You can also see a wainscotting detail was added, but it didn’t quite jive with the rest of the industrial condo, so it ultimately got cut in the final design stages.
Final Design
The show piece of the bathroom is definitely the shower tile! There’s always a risk when picking something bold that you will tire of it over time. Not the case here! 2 years later and she still loves it! The built-in tile bench also got swapped out for a teak bench, which in the end added some nice texture and warmth to the space!
The closet had a door that was intended to get paint painted black, as you can see in the drawings below, but once the open shelves got staged, it made the space feel more open and added some more visual layers to the space, so the door stayed off in the end!
The After:
The final reveal …and ain’t she a stunner! What an amazing mix of patterns and textures - if we don’t say so ourselves! One of the things we do as designers is critique our work after it’s done. We learn things on every project - some things good, some things bad! Here is a short summary of what Emily learned from this that she would have done differently:
She specified the vanity counter to only have 1/4” overhang so that it would read as a “box”. However beautiful to look at, it isn’t functional because combined with the push open doors, it pops open every time they are at the sink.
She would have added a shower niche for shampoo bottles. It was in the original design, but she had high hopes of getting a custom bottle holder made out of steel. It’s one of those details that never got sorted out and just fell to the wayside.
Don’t cheap out on plumbing fixtures. A knock off will cause more headaches in the end because they are just not made the same as the good stuff.
The open storage shelves were an unplanned afterthought, but had they been a part of the plan, she would have remade them out of wood. This would have finished off the closet a bit more as more formal open shelving.
Take a scroll through the final photos and see it for yourselves!
We like to make sure our clients have their expectations set appropriately. Full transparency, this bathroom renovation cost around $17,000 (back in 2020) and no plumbing was relocated. A full service design fee for a project like this would be around $3,000. Accessories added on to that as well! Not to mention the price of materials have increased over the last 2 years! Today, that same floor tile that was $3.99/sq ft in 2020 is now $5.99/sq ft. We think it’s important to know all that before starting a reno! Make your wish list, set your priorities and set your budget. The reality for most projects is that changes and comprises will need to be made, but it doesn’t mean that you have to give up designing something great and that you love!
SHOP THE LOOK!
