A utilitarian shower stall works just as well as something nicer, so why spend the time and effort—and money—to upgrade it?
“It’s in the idea of home comfort,” he said Paloma Contreras, an interior designer in Houston. Your shower, he explained, is “a space where you set the scene for the day. If you’re aesthetically attuned to your surroundings, it affects your state of mind.”
If you are renovating, you don’t need to resort to generic materials and fittings, or anything else your contractor suggests. The goal, Ms. Contreras said, is to “surround yourself with a space that’s not only beautiful, but works really well and meets your preferences.”
See how she and other designers create showers that their customers love waking up to.
Consider changing the layout
Installing a new shower often goes hand in hand with a full bathroom renovation, and if you’re tearing down what was there before, you don’t have to put everything back where it was. Take some time to think about how you can reorganize it.
A combined bathtub and shower, for example, could easily be replaced with a walk-in shower. Depending on the size of your bathroom, it may be possible to install a freestanding bathtub elsewhere. A shower and freestanding bath can occupy different zones of a bathroom, or sit side by side in a wet room – a larger waterproof area designed to resist errant shower spray.
“We’ve designed wet spaces for a lot of projects, but mostly we’d do a wet room when the room is smaller and we want to eliminate the shower door casing,” said David John Dick, founder of the Los Angeles-based company. Internal disk spaces.
Choose things you will actually use
The shower is one of the most personal spaces in your home, she said Paris Forino, an interior designer in New York, so you shouldn’t choose fixtures and features just because you saw them in a magazine. Choose things you will actually enjoy.
Rain shower heads, for example, have been trendy for years, but they’re not for everyone. “I personally can’t stand it,” Ms. Forino said. “If you don’t wash your hair every day, you’re standing with your neck at a 90-degree angle and it’s really uncomfortable.”
If you’re like Ms. Forino, a wall-mounted shower head that sprays at an angle is a better option. If you want a shower that can deliver refreshing bursts of water, choose a head with various massage settings, Ms. Contreras suggested.
Adding a hand shower is usually a good idea — you can direct the spray anywhere and it makes cleaning the shower much easier. Some people also love a steam generator, Ms. Forino said, for a comfortable experience.
Wall-mounted body sprays, however, seem to be falling into disuse, Ms. Contreras noted: “People didn’t really ask for them. I think it was a novelty 10 years ago, but most people have found that they just don’t end up using them.”
Whatever fixtures you choose, carefully plan the location of the controls. If possible, place them just inside the shower entrance and away from the shower head so you can heat the water without getting soaked. “We always try to keep the controls accessible and avoid getting wet before you’re ready,” said Kirsten Blazek, the founder of A1000xBetteran interior design firm in Pasadena, Calif., whose book “A Rebel by Design” was released by Rizzoli this month.
Use of Materials with Character
An easy way to improve the look of your shower is to choose interesting materials with character instead of plain white tile.
Ms. Forino made a compact shower in a Beverly Hills home look special by covering one wall with a slab of striking pink Arabescato Rosa marble. On the floor, he used four varieties of marble to create a custom mosaic that provides a tighter surface.
For a home in Toronto, where he designed a two-person shower, he used book-matched onyx slabs on the walls, “because they really wanted a wow factor.”
Even with understated designs, the choice of material makes a difference. For a wet room shower in a house on Canfield Island, Connecticut, designers from the Brooklyn-based interior design firm Jesse Parris-Lamb used subway tile, but chose ceramics from Waterworks with handmade charm and subtle color variation. “They have really beautiful colors and mood,” said Whitney Parris-Lamb, who runs the company with Amanda Jesse. “There’s a lot of traffic.”
And don’t forget the drain: Instead of a standard metal drain cover, many designers opt for a linear drain that can be tiled and almost disappear into the floor.
Make a Login
Like a foyer, the entrance to your shower sets the stage for what’s to come, so it’s worth paying some attention to the windows and doors.
For simplified showers in modern bathrooms, some designers try to eliminate the dividing line between the shower and the rest of the room. When Ms. Blazek renovated a midcentury modern house outside Los Angeles, she added a vibration-free shower: The bathroom floor simply slopes toward a drain, and the glass barrier sits in recessed channels in the floor and ceiling, doesn’t it? visible. “She’s just seamless,” he said.
Disc Interiors took the opposite approach on a 1930s home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. They made the shower a feature by outlining the entryway with marble, adding a large marble threshold, and installing signature glass doors framed in powder-coated metal.
“We wanted to add a more vintage aesthetic,” Mr. Dick said. “With stone backsplashes and barriers, we often play with the thickness and other dimensions so that it adds depth and volume to the bathroom space.”
One approach is not better than the other — it all depends on the look you want to achieve.
Create functional surfaces
Of course, it’s not just about how your shower looks, it’s also about how it works.
One of the most critical things is having a place to put soap and shampoo. It is possible to add shower baskets after a renovation, but all the designers interviewed for this story prefer a built-in solution.
Ms. Contreras has designed showers with built-in stone corner shelves, and Disc Interiors has used brass to match the plumbing. The most common option is an alcove, but if you plan to install one, it’s essential to measure your shampoo bottles and ensure the niche is tall enough. “There’s no point in creating a niche unless it fits the specific products the customer has,” Ms. Jesse said.
When possible, Ms. Blazek likes to place the alcove on a side wall rather than the back wall, so it’s not the first thing people see when they enter the bathroom.
Shelves and niches are not the only options. Ms. Blazek sometimes thickens the bottom of a wall to create an overhang that runs the length of the shower. Other times, he adds a bench, which provides a place to sit and store bottles.
If you have a steam shower, Mr. Dick said, “a bench is absolutely essential.”
Designing a niche may not be as exciting as choosing tiles, Ms Parris-Lamb said, but “the ultimate luxury is having a niche for everything”.
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