From Small Bathroom to Dream Spa

Let's face it, we all spend a lot of time in the bathroom and for such a small room a lot of time and effort goes into planning.  Not everyone has a huge space to work with or the budget to create the spa bathroom of their dreams, but here are some tips on how we turned a modest sized master bathroom into my favorite room in my home--the spa!

From the beginning I had a vision of it looking like a spa, with lots of cool blue and green tones, so that was where the majority of the inspiration came from. However, with a 20x40 townhouse it was impossible to create a huge, spacious dream bathroom so we had to be practical. Once the overall layout of the house was decided, we moved the master bathroom back towards the rear of the house about 6 feet. The area before was a small, unusable storage room.
We had our guest bathroom downstairs with much more space so we decided to opt for a tub down there and simple a spacious, kick ass shower upstairs. 

We knew the master bedroom would have a door out to the balcony of the sunroom, so we used the existing window opening (with some new framing) to create a window for the master bath.  After all the new plumbing, framing and sheetrock was complete, we began creating the shower pan which runs the entire width of the bathroom.  We used cement board backer up to where the tile border would be. 

Tile selection proved to be quite an arduous process. I knew I wanted tiny 1x1 glass tiles in the shower but the cost of most tile like that (around $25 per square foot) made things cost prohibitive. But after months and months of searching for the right (and reasonably priced) tile to base the bathroom around, success was found at Walker Zanger in Manhattan, with their Spa Glass series which ran around $13 per square foot. We choose the pool blend of green and blues. Finding complimentary floor tiles also proved difficult, until we stumbled upon the “Thossoss White and Ming Green” mosaic tile from SMC Stone in Greenpoint Brooklyn. We also got 4x4 ming green tiles to create a boarder around the floor. We chose Ralph Lauren’s “Baltic Green” paint from their Vintage Masters Collection for the walls.

The glass tile came in 12 x 12 sheets that needed to be aligned extremely carefully on the walls. Sheets were put up, removed, and reinstalled again and again until every little 1 inch glass tile lined up as perfectly as possible.

We also tiled the entire floor of the shower pan and a bench on one side of the shower. We made sure the pan had a slight pitch to it towards the drain

For the floor we did a ring of 4 x 4 ming green tiles towards the outside border and put a ring of the 1 x 2 white tiles from the mosaic around that to break up the space to the 4 x 4 backsplash tile border.

For the toilet we chose a white Kohler Serif Comfort Height elongated with awesome top lift-know flush actuator. I know I’m about to sing the praises of a toilet seat, but this one is crazy well designed! It has a “QuietClose” function where the lid slowly and gently closes even if you try to slam it. And believe me I tried! It also has a quick release so you can simply take the seat off, clean around the connectors (which always get grungy) and clip back on the seat super easily!

For the final detailing on the shower pan we used white/gray marble pieces from Home Depot cut to size and 1 x 4 pieces of the 4x4 ming green tile for accenting between the bench and the wall and in the threshold. Figuring out tile transitions that made sense was a bit of a challenge, but we managed to come up with some pretty creative solutions.

For the sink we got a Hastings Zero 100 with aluminum and glass stand with shelf. The faucet is our pride and joy—a HansaCanyon temperature sensitive LED faucet. Frivolous? Yes. Awesome? Yes. 

For the shower enclosure we opted to not really close much in. The bathroom was fairly small and we didn’t want to close off the space of hide our nice tile so we put a ¾ inch thick piece of clear safety glass along the shower pan and left the other side open. In the window we put a glass unit of frost laminate and acid etched glass. Cause we wanted to let light in but didn’t want the backyard neighbors to see us showering…

At the top left of our shower enclosure we installed an aluminum and laminated glass shelf from Ikea to store bath products up and out of the way—keeps all our décor lines clean.

For storage, two Ikea Baren aluminum and glass wall cabinets hung next to each other and a Lagio small chest of drawers from TopdeQ.  Lots of storage in the bathroom keeps surfaces from feeling too cluttered without denied you products. 

But by far the best part of the bathroom is the shower tower. To be precise it’s a Hansgrohe Starck X shower wall. Hansgrohe and/or Starck should be paying me a percentage for how much I hype this thing up. We wanted a spa-like bathroom complete with lots of jets of water, but the installation of separate jets throughout the shower seems time consuming and costly. We opted for it all in one unit, the rain head, the six jets and the wand, all in a sleek aluminum packaging with storage for bath-related goodies on either side. This shower is the best thing ever.

I hope this article gave you some ideas for creating the spa bathroom of your dreams!