If you have decided to build a detached house with a small bathroom, this does not mean that this living room cannot have everything of a large one. Indeed, tips for storage, decoration, lighting, tiling, and layout of your small bathroom can make it functional and visually larger. The teams of Maisons SIC, who will support you through all the stages of building your new home, giving you their best advice.
Why furnish your small bathroom with a shower rather than a bathtub?
Maisons SIC, a builder of individual houses in Nouvelle Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrénées, provides you with a whole decoration and design team who can advise you as best as possible on all the rooms in the house.
As can be seen within the interactive showroom in our Exhibition HallDirected by the VR Interactive company, many choices of furniture, colors, materials are possible to furnish your living room, your bedrooms, your kitchen or your bathroom. To help you see more clearly in the layout of a small bathroom (as she did with her tips for planning a small kitchen), Patricia Castillo, director of the interior design and decoration advice team, gives all her tips.
Which shower model for a small bathroom?
To begin, we'll be talking about a shower room rather than a bathroom. It's quite difficult to fit a bathtub, even a small one or a slipper, into a bathroom of only 2 or 4 square meters. Therefore, in a small shower room, priority is given to a shower. Regarding the model, Patricia Castillo explains: “Walk-in showers remain fashionable, but there's a growing trend towards recessed shower trays, which sit flush with the floor, like a walk-in shower, but are much easier to clean because they don't have grout lines. And since bathrooms are returning to a more minimalist aesthetic, a shower tray is less visually cluttered than a walk-in shower. For a more authentic look, slate or stone effects are often chosen…”
Glass walls and small niches…
Always to open the small room to the maximum, we will avoid choosing only tiled and blackout walls for our shower and we will prefer glazed walls or industrial style, such as workshop canopies for example, very fashionable.
Also, “in the showers, if the design allows it, one or more niches can be created in the partition in order to put the toiletries there and thus avoid adding anything extra (such as iron shelves) in a small shower.”
Tile colors and size: the right choices to “enlarge” a small bathroom
To enlarge a small bathroom, there are some tips for the colors used. We know, the light colours They reflect light and create a feeling of spaciousness. To make your bathroom appear larger, you'll likely opt for white tiles or beige paint. For an even stronger visual effect, you can also choose a dark floor and light walls. On the walls, light and glossy tiles will reflect light better. And here's Patricia Castillo's little tip: “at wall tile level, to give depth and volume to the room, we try to work on the widest part of the wall and stay on lighter walls on the other parts.”
XXL tiles on the walls and parquet effect on the floor
A trend that is taking hold and making bathrooms more welcoming is parquet effect tiling, whose format is also very suitable for bathrooms. You can find them in all colors (from raw wood effect to gray via white or black) and taking up the patterns of all types of wood.
But to truly enlarge a shower room, Patricia Castillo's advice is to opt “downright for very large format tiles, so that there are very few joints in the floor and this naturally enlarges the volume of the room.” Same advice for the walls: “ The key to visually enlarging a room is to use large-format wall tiles. The larger the format, the more it will make the room appear larger. If you use 20x40 cm tiles, the room will appear smaller than if you use 30x60 cm or 28x80 cm tiles, whether on the walls or the floor. People are often afraid, wrongly, to use large formats in a small room. If there are more cuts involved, the final result completely transforms the room.
Arrange your small bathroom with lightness: the choice of furniture
Another trick to make a small shower room seem bigger: free up floor space. To do this, we ban freestanding furniture and opt instead for hanging furniture which gives more lightness to the room (and which also makes it much easier to maintain). For example, prefer a suspended vanity unit rather than a washbasin. You can also choose open shelves (which must always be kept tidy, however, to avoid cluttering the room) and, for example, a long tall unit with a glass front that reflects light. Thin storage columns of different sizes, to be placed in the corners, can make it possible to lose no space.
Remember to leave space on a wall for a dry towel, which will not take up much space and is very practical in a bathroom.
At the level of the basins, as Patricia Castillo points out: “We'll be sure of the molded countertop, which takes up less space than countertop basins and will allow for smaller furniture underneath.. "
Finally, instead of a classic door, choose a hanging, sliding or pocket door which will save you a lot of space for passage.
Play with lighting to provide more space in your small bathroom
Light is another of your great allies when you have a small bathroom. For this, “it is better to work with spotlights integrated into the ceiling than lighting on a mirror. it brings a much more natural light. And good lighting is going to make the room a lot bigger than just one light on the mirror.” And another piece of advice:When it comes to mirrors, there's a real return to small glass-fronted cabinets like the ones our grandparents had, which provide extra storage.. "
—
Contact the professional teams at Maisons SIC to manage the construction of your new house from start to finish!
