Written by Patrick Sutton
Bathrooms are botched more than any other room in the house. The big problem is water. It’s central to the room’s function, but it also can be a source of damage. And designers unduly focus on cosmetics at the expense of critically important construction basics.
Broadly speaking, the two causes of botched bathrooms are an unwillingness to spend the time and money it takes to construct a bathroom properly, and inexperienced people handling the work. After 10 years of remodeling bathrooms, I’ve torn out a lot of other people’s mistakes. Here are my seven sins of bathroom design.
1. Inadequate Waterproofing
Bathrooms are wet rooms first, design showcases second. Every aspect of planning and construction should take water exposure into account. If the waterproofing bill isn’t at least 5 to 10 percent of the job cost, someone is cutting corners. Badly made shower pans and improperly flashed windows in showers routinely fail and can lead to major damage. Inexpensive building and decorating materials like MDF, particleboard, veneered cabinetry, laminate counters, thinly plated metal fixtures and wallpaper make for planned obsolescence.
Design instead with durable, homogeneous materials like stone (natural or manmade), glass, tile, terrazzo, concrete, stainless steel and tough hardwoods. For baseboards and casings, I like to use PVC or composites such as MoistureShield. Wood cabinets and trim should be a nickel’s thickness off the floor to prevent water contact, and leveling feet allow cabinetry to stay dry.
2. Slippery Floors
Shine is fine for faucets, but glossy tile and polished stone make for slippery, unsafe floors. These materials cause lots of falls, and they’re maintenance headaches, too, revealing every scratch and wearing unevenly.
Imperfections and bumps are good qualities in bathroom floors. The floor should be made of tumbled stone or tile that provides ample traction. Variation in color, texture and size also helps to prevent falls, and it looks great. Floor tiles smaller than 12-by-12 will also improve traction by increasing the number of grout joints.
Shower floors need even smaller tile with lots of grout joints, both to offer traction and to conform to the floor slope. Porous tumbled stone (travertine, limestone, etc.) is an ideal bathroom-floor material, both for its traction and its low maintenance.
I love designing small-stone and unglazed-tile mosaics for shower floors. Daltile has a reasonably priced water-jet service that allows fine details and curves to be cut in even the smallest tiles, permitting the creation of almost any image or geometry in a tile field at far less expense than hand-laid stone mosaics.
Tread cautiously when considering a wood floor. Teak, ipé, and other tropical woods might make attractive bathroom flooring, but building a safe, durable wood floor for a bathroom costs a lot more than laying basic tile over backerboard and thick plywood. As for carpet, just forget it. Water and carpet pad are a nasty brew, and don’t get me started about carpet around toilets. Ick! The year 1975 was very bad for bathrooms.
3. No Natural Light
Our ancestors were so grateful to have indoor plumbing, they didn’t need ambiance. But nowadays, people expect a lot more from a bathroom. The tiny, damp and dingy interior bathroom with a little round light fixture in the ceiling is old-school.
Admittedly, lack of natural light is a sin in any room, but bathrooms feel particularly creepy without natural light. Find any conceivable way to bring it into a bathroom. Use etched glass to carry in light from an adjoining room that has exterior windows. Use skylights. Use light tubes. Use structural glass block dropped into a hole in the floor to bring light in from the room below. Use motorized mirrors salvaged from a shuttle mission — whatever it takes.
4. Boring Tile
Daunted by seemingly unlimited choices, too many people just go with a tried-and-true 4-by-4 white tile. It’s boring, but it’s safe.
Plain-Jane tile represents a lost opportunity for personal expression, or simply for visual interest. I’ve seen it in new houses going for over a million dollars. Taking the trouble to design with various colors or sizes costs almost nothing extra. Anything, and I mean anything, is better than a blanket of white tile. Live a little. If you feel lost among the tile products available, keep in mind a specific design theme, and then find the tiles that execute the theme. Believe me, they’re out there somewhere. But remember, a great tile design still can’t overcome a leak-prone installation, which effectively makes the tile worthless.
5. Bad Math
I was once called about a just-completed tiled shower in which a sliver of cut tile ran vertically right up the middle of the wall. The installer hadn’t counted before setting the tile; he and his helper started at opposite sides and met in the middle. The job had to be gutted.
Math is important because bathroom space is usually at a premium — every inch matters. Errors in math lead to glaring tile-layout problems, shower stalls and toilet alcoves that don’t meet code minimums, faucet handles that bang into backsplashes (my pet peeve), oversized pedestal sinks that interfere with door clearances, large gaps between toilet tank and wall — you name it. Measure and count over and over before materials are ordered and installed in bathrooms. Make templates whenever possible. Caulk doesn’t atone for the sin of bad math.
6. Bathrooms in Kitchens
People will stick powder rooms anywhere. One place is particularly egregious, though: A bathroom should not open directly into a kitchen. (Your local building code might forbid it anyway.) I will do anything to prevent a bathroom door from opening into a kitchen, or to avoid placing a toilet so that it’s visible from the kitchen. No one working with food or enjoying food wants to be reminded where the baked ziti goes in the end.
7. Toilets Facing the Door
You know how those little push-button door locks sometimes don’t catch? It always happens when Uncle Elmer comes for a visit. How embarrassing! Don’t place a toilet facing the bathroom door.
Good sight lines are key. In a small bathroom, the toilet should be perpendicular to the doorway and visually screened. For instance, use simple wood screens or semi-translucent panels such as etched glass to suggest some degree of privacy for this, the most intimate of personal tasks.
My favorite solution for setting off a toilet area is a thick wood panel with an open-work design or interesting veneer. The panel needs to rest on stainless-steel furniture glides or round doorstops with the rubber pulled out so that the wood doesn’t take up water through the end grain. At the same time, avoid entirely walled-in toilets in minimum code widths (usually 30 in.). People hate them, and inevitably the fan roars loudly within. A toilet stall is ideal at 36 to 42 inches wide, with 27 to 30 inches of space in front of the toilet.
Patrick Sutton started wrecking houses and re-designing them in 1995, while still practicing law in Washington, DC. He’s been designing and building kitchens & baths full-time since 1998. Thanks to our sister publication, Fine Homebuilding, for lending Patrick to us.
