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Creating More Space Inside the Bathroom
Photo: Wilsonart International
Elegant baths do not have to occupy large rooms. Install a narrow vanity with a sink bump-out. Add large mirrors to create the illusion of more space.
Once you have gathered all the space you can from outside the bathroom, its time to look at the bathroom itself. You can make even the tiniest bath work hard and feel bigger, brighter, and bolder.
Artful bathroom design is about packing a lot of efficiency, a sense of openness, and great style into tight quarters. The challenge is to maximize apparent floor area while accommodating the trio of plumbing necessities - sink, toilet, and tub and/or shower - that collectively demand so much square footage. Here are some ideas we have gathered over the years that you may find useful.
Rearrange and Replace
Reconfigure fixtures to help traffic flow and eliminate wasted space. Replace a large vanity with a shallow vanity or counter top. A vanity is typically 21" deep. You don't need that much room to brush your teeth. Except around the sink, the vanity can be as little as 12" deep. Ok, you only opened up an additional 9" of floor space, but it’s amazing how much it adds that feeling of spaciousness and freedom of movement.
Replace Bulky with Sleek and Slim
This elegant tempered glass wall sink from Kohler is so airy it's almost not there.
Substitute sleek, slim fixtures for bulky ones. Dump the vanity entirely and install a pedestal sink, better yet, a wall-mounted sink. If your family prefers showers to baths, eliminate the tub and install a shower instead. A shower can take up much less room than a full-size tub, often as little as half.
Don't Waste Corner Space
Corners are big opportunities. Consider corner fixtures such as tubs, showers, and vanities. Replacing a full-size tub with a corner tub saves as much as 1/3rd of the tub's floor space.
How About a Pocket Door
Replacing a hinged door with sliding pocket door frees up the area inside the bathroom required for the door to swing. The new pocket doors, unlike many earlier models, are sturdy, robust, and will provide trouble-free operation for the life of the room. Reversing the door so it swings out is also a solution.
Build in as much storage as possible
Put Bare Walls to Work
Wall cabinets add convenient storage.
Put those bare walls to work. Any wall not covered by the shower or a cabinet can become storage. The space in the wall between studs is ideal
shallow storage that can run from floor to ceiling. How about a floor to ceiling medicine cabinet built right into the wall? Who else even has one?
Wall cabinets are typical in kitchens for additional storage, rare in bathrooms. But shallow. bathroom-style wall cabinets on both sides of the sink and above the toilet provide very useful and convenient storage for linens and all sorts of personal items. Corner wall cabinets that open from two sides are especially accessible and effective on both sides of the lavatory.
Revamp the Vanity
Typical vanities provide awful storage. The large space under the sink is dark, uninviting and full of pipes. Whatever gets pushed to the back is pretty much lost forever. Pull out trays and baskets are needed to make this space effective storage.
A new idea we think has a great deal of merit is a wrap-around drawer under the sink. The drawer has a cut-out that fits around the sink and compartments to hold all the things you use at the sink — brushes, pins, Q-tips, hair bands and so on. Some vanity manufacturers provide these drawers, but if not, they are simple enough to convert locally out of a regular drawer.
Use Toe-Kick Space
Park that bathroom scale, hide that hamper. Create a space in the toe kick space under the vanity to hide the bathroom scale. Toe-kick space in a bathroom is usually completely unused, but has a lot of potential for storage. See Using Toe-Kick Space for more ideas.
Tip out hamper folds neatly into the cabinet and out of the way when not in use.
Replace the Hamper
Get the hamper out of the way. We have never seen a traditional bathroom in which there was actually room for a hamper. It gets stuck in wherever it will fit — and most of the time it doesn't fit.
A hamper can be built into a vanity or other cabinet, even into a wall.
One of the most creative ideas we have seen was a tip-out hamper built into the wall adjoining the laundry room. It tipped out in the laundry room to unload the clothes into the washer. How about a laundry-chute? A lot of old houses had them, and we don't understand why they fell out of favor. A small hatch in the wall of the bathroom for a chute takes up a lot less space than a hamper, and is a lot more convenient for mom come laundry day.
Consider a Power Cabinet
Another idea we like a lot and build often is a "power" cabinet. In a narrow cabinet on the right side of the vanity (left side for southpaws) we install two deep pullout trays and two GFI electrical outlets — one for each tray. Plug all electrical appliances — hair dryers, curling irons, hot rollers, electric toothbrushes — in the outlets and store them in the trays when not in use. All those electrical cords snaking across the countertop are now gone forever: hidden behind the cabinet door.
For an experienced designer's thoughtful insights on bathroom design, take a look at David Edrington's Ten Important Elements of a Good Bathroom. For the views of Better Homes and Garden magazine experts on the elements of a good bathroom design, see Planning Your Dream Bath.
For even more good reading, check out our complete articles index.