When people buy a new home, one of the two most popular rooms to improve is the bathroom – the other is the kitchen. The reasons behind wanting them to be better have these two things in common: They are both very personal in their preferences, and they both have come a long, long way. The sheer variety of touches that can personalize a bathroom today are abundant. The one thing most people have in common is that they want their bathrooms to be bigger.
Today’s bathroom often borders on a personal spa. At least it is a place of comfort that people do not always want to rush through. We have the history of a room in the back of our minds when we go to work on the future. Perspective, they call it, and with it we can better understand what our clients are telling us about their desires and goals for design.
Making News All Along
Compared with the other spaces of the home, the bathroom is a relatively recent arrival. In a matter of just a few generations, it made the journey from outside the home to inside. Victorian homes owe their tiny first-floor “powder rooms” to the fact that plumbing itself was likely a retro-fit when the bathroom was created, and available space had to be repurposed.
When the Craftsman, the Mission style, and the Bungalow came into popularity after the turn of the 20th century, they were the first generation of homes that had bathrooms designed in from the start. Looking now at the advertising of the period, those original bathrooms look purposeful and yet perfunctory. They were usually all-white and all-business.
In the 1930s, a riot of color came to American bathrooms, when tile technology discovered the formulae that enabled people to plunge far beyond the white “subway tiles” that characterized the bathrooms of earlier homes. The colors they left behind for us to enjoy in vintage homes certainly are imaginative, but not always to our present-day taste. Sometimes, in fact, the old colors look as if people installed them just because they could, especially from the 30s through the 80s. This alone is enough to prompt many people to want a new bathroom for the new year.
A Personal Spa
Today, the restorative experience that Europeans used to travel to resort hotels built around mineral springs to enjoy can be ours every day of the week. In fact, that’s where our term, “spa,” came from. Spa is an ancient town in Belgium where people have come since Roman times for the power of the waters to relax and restore. Today, we can have those powers at our fingertips, in the next room, or right down the hall.
Let’s have a talk about finding a better fit for that bathroom in the new year, a more relaxing experience, a more personal expression. Connecting your desires with the possibilities that fine design can offer is our passion and our pursuit. We look forward to getting together.
