Before & After : Bathroom

As you know we moved to Manhattan about seven months ago from London.  We weren't really ready to leave London, but when my husband's company offered us the opportunity to live in New York how could we say no?  The offer was kind of a shock as we were settling in to life in the UK and had even  just purchased a 600 square foot apartment in North London (Tufnell Park to be exact) in July 2010. 

With me being a designer, and my husband being great at DIY (I mean AMAZING!), we were looking for a project.  Not only did we think that it would be a good way to increase the value of our investment, but neither of us could picture moving into a perfectly renovated apartment - we wanted to put our own stamp on it.  We made an appointment with the estate agent to go and look at an apartment and when we arrived realised that we were not seeing the one we thought. The agent explained that the one we originally wanted to see was no longer available, however this one was so why don't we take a look.  At first we laughed our way around - the apartment looked like something out of the 80's with bad kitchen cabinets and bathroom tiles, vinyl faux tile and wood flooring, surface-mounted cabling running all over, and a retro infrared multi-room stereo system. With all that being ridiculed, the more we walked around the more we realized that it was perfect! 8 weeks later we were the proud first-time apartment owners and had a big project on our hands.

Over the next couple of weeks I will take you through our renovation starting toady with the bathroom!  As you can see from the images below the bathroom was in need of a serious facelift! The tiles were out-dated, the room wasn't well organised and felt really dark and tiny, and with very high ceilings in such a small room, it just felt like the proportions were all wrong.  We wanted to make the room feel larger, brighter and more modern.

As neither of us really take baths we decided to remove the bath and install a walk-in shower instead. This really helped to make the room feel much larger as it opened up the floor space.  We also wanted to make the scale of the room feel more proportioned so lowered the ceiling about 30cm - this gave us space to recess the extractor vent and LED lighting which added a lot of light and brightness to the space. We installed large white gloss subway tiles 3/4 way up two walls and slate tiles (both from Fired Earth) for the flooring to keep the material palette very simple.  The paint on the other two walls and above the tiles was a gloss Slate III from Paint & Paper Library, a colour I used on several clients projects and was dying to have in my own house. We kept the fittings very modern and minimal with chrome and white porcelain.  On the whole the room turned out exactly as we wanted, and with the mirrored cabinet above the sink we even got some much needed storage!