I’ve designed and decorated a few bathrooms in my years of renovating properties and being an interior decorator. This post is featuring a few of my favorite bathroom details I’ve incorporated into our new townhouse to help it feel unique, pretty and function well.
These favorite bathroom details are from soap dispensers to design tips to make the space work and look better.
Number 1: Vanity Lights
Vanity Light Choice: Choose a vanity light that extends far enough to shed light on the front of the mirror.
If this has been done for you already, you may have not noticed it. However, if your light doesn’t extend out far enough to clear the depth of the medicine cabinet, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about!
A light fixture over the medicine cabinet that is too shallow will cast an annoying shadow when you look in the mirror, plus it makes the light looks awkwardly sunk in.
For our townhouse bathroom, after selected the medicine cabinets, (they are available HERE), I could concentrate on getting the right lights.
Once I knew the specs of the medicine cabinets and how far they would extend out from the wall, I could then select light fixtures that would extend beyond that depth.
By scaling the light depth to the medicine cabinet depth will not only make it function better, it will make it look better.
Style and Cost
Every time I work on a design project for a house there is always a basic rule I apply: Create a design with finishes that coordinate with the property, both in style and in cost.
In other words…
Selecting finishes for our new townhouse meant: make it pretty, but not too fancy, and don’t spend a boatload of money.
In truth, adding design elements no matter how large the budget is, is a thoughtful process.
If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you should know that in the past 13 years, this is our 4th house we’ve lived at in that time, and that’s not including the other properties I’ve worked on in my career.
Our real estate buying and selling experience has educated us on a couple things:
- Know that the term ‘forever home’ is to be taken lightly.
- Will this element help our property sell better and will we recoup our investment if that should arise?
- When selecting finishes for a house, consider if it matches the style of the property.
- Is the maintenance going to be easy?
In a nutshell: easy to clean, holds up well, will appeal to a buyer, and not so expensive or fancy that it’ll overprice the property.
I filtered my selections of finishes for our townhouse through those thoughts.
Number 2: Shower Tile
For our shower, instead of a fully tiled shower, (walls and floor) which is much more expensive and definitely higher maintenance, we had the builder install a high quality fiberglass shower enclosure.
Here’s my favorite bathroom design tip to fancy up a fiberglass shower: add tile all the way to the ceiling on the wall above the enclosure.
This tile design feature totally makes the shower look and feel like a higher end shower, but the smooth shower enclosure is so much easier to maintain and clean daily.
The tile I selected for the shower is a slightly textured classic gloss white subway tile.
While we’re in the shower…
My next favorite bathroom feature is pretty simple but makes a huge difference.
Number 3: Soap and Shampoo Dispenser
I love this soap and shampoo dispenser we mounted on the shower wall. In fact, we had this same style dispenser at our last house and have installed one at our cottage now as well.
You can find this fantastic dispenser HERE.
Using it looks so much better than bottles of soap and shampoo floating around in the shower.
It also helps the younger grandchildren portion how much soap they use, so we have one in the guest bath shower.
And speaking of kids using them, this style is very sturdy and has held up very well with no issues at all. I did show each kiddo how the back lever pulls forward to dispense the soap to help prevent mishaps in the shower.
It’s a cinch to pop the lid off and refill the container. Or you can remove the whole container if you wanted to wash it out and add a different soap in it.
They work great and offer a nice and clean look in the shower.
I made custom labels, which also helps the kids, (and me on a sleepy morning!) to remember what is what.
Well, I guess since we’re talking about soap dispensers, let me show you another one that made my favorites list.
Number 4: Soap and Lotion Dispenser
I am loving these soap dispensers we have at our vanity.
They are sturdy, clean looking and easy to keep clean.
In our master bathroom, we have double sinks, so I have a set of dispensers at each sink.
In fact, I like them so much, I ordered a set for the kitchen sink too. One dispenser for hand soap and one dispenser for hand lotion.
Things that hold up well, and are easy to clean gives us more time to do fun stuff, which bring me to the last item on my favorite bathroom details list.
Number 5: The toilet!
I have a pet peeve… I strongly dislike toilets that have that curly cue design in the porcelain around the outside of the base that is not attractive or fun to clean.
That’s why for our last house, and for our new townhouse, I selected skirted toilets!
See how smooth and easy to wipe down the exterior of the base of the toilet is?! I love that!
You can find this toilet HERE.
We have the same style in all 3 of our bathrooms.
This toilet also has what they call a ‘continuous clean’ feature. You can put a cleaning tablet in a separate compartment in the tank. Then every time you flush, a little cleaning happens.
So there you have it, a few of my favorite bathroom details we have incorporated here at our new home. Even though it’s a townhouse and not a big fancy house, it still can feel and function beautifully!
Thank you for stopping by, I appreciate you reading along.
Interested in more reading? HERE is the Blog Landing with the most recent posts.
Follow and share this blog with your friends!
Be sure to sign up to receive an email when a new blog post is published.
Share Your Thoughts