Main bathroom with a freestanding tub

Building the shower pan

The first photograph is the part of a bathroom that decides how long it lasts. The pan is being formed, the mosaic floor is set into the pitch, and the curb is built but not yet clad. Everything visible here disappears permanently within about a week.

The floor is mosaic rather than large format, and that is a structural choice rather than a decorative one. A shower floor has to fall toward the drain from every direction at once. Small tiles follow that compound slope because each one sits on its own plane and the grout lines absorb the change in angle. A large tile cannot, which is why you see hexagon and penny mosaic on shower floors and large format on the walls above.

More grout also means more grip underfoot, in the one room in the house where that genuinely matters.

Tile, clips and why the walls look like that

The blue clips across the wall tile are levelling clips. Large-format porcelain is not perfectly flat, and at this size a difference of a millimetre between the edges of two adjacent tiles catches the light and is visible from across the room. Clips hold neighbouring tiles in the same plane while the thinset cures, then snap off at the base.

The same system runs around the window. Tiling into a window reveal in a wet area is the fiddliest part of a job like this: the reveal has to be waterproofed and tiled with the fall running out toward the opening rather than back into the wall, and every internal corner is sealed rather than grouted, because grout is not waterproof and corners are where movement concentrates.

The freestanding tub

A freestanding tub is the fixture people most often want and most often cannot have. It needs clearance on all four sides to look like anything other than a mistake, and in a standard main bathroom that clearance usually does not exist.

Here it does, because the tub sits in its own bay with the shower beside it rather than competing with it. The filler is separate from the shower controls, which means another set of supply lines roughed into the floor or wall before anything is closed up. Deciding in week four that you would like a floor-mounted filler means opening a floor that has already been tiled.

These tubs are also heavy when full and carry their weight on a small footprint rather than spreading it across a frame. The joists underneath are worth a look before the tub is ordered, not after it arrives.

Vanity, mirror and the long counter

The vanity is floating, wood-look, with a long integrated counter and twin basins under a single backlit mirror. Floating it keeps the floor visible underneath, which is the cheapest way to make a bathroom read larger without changing its dimensions.

Drawers rather than doors is the detail that matters most in daily use. A cabinet with doors loses its middle to the trap and becomes a place where things go to be forgotten. Drawers built around the trap give you two full-width tiers you can actually see into.

The mirror runs nearly the full width of the counter and is lit from behind the edge. Overhead downlights throw shadow down onto the face, which is the wrong direction for anything you actually do at a mirror.

Specification

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