Homeowner envisioned reclining in the bath, a glass of wine in hand, while staring up at the night sky. Find out more.
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A home renovation may only involve a smaller project, but that doesn’t preclude incorporating a bigger design concept beyond mere functionality and updating materials. For a bathroom transformation in an older New Westminster property, the homeowner had a unique and highly specific request that defined the remodel plan: She envisioned reclining in the bath, a glass of wine in hand, while staring up at the stars.
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Fulfilling that brief meant not just reworking the floor plan but making the bathtub the focal point of the space. Though an averaged sized bathroom at 80 square feet, the room felt smaller because it was long and narrow. For Rebecca Foster, principal and lead designer at Align Interior Design, the solution was to reposition the tub at the end of the room against the outside wall.
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Westcoast Homes
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“It had just a tiny window there,” Foster explains. “We made that window bigger and centred it on the wall. There was no skylight there. We totally opened up the ceiling to make this beautiful skylight.”
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To emphasize it as focal point, Foster’s concept involved adding an arch to frame the tub — an idea that came from the homeowner discovering an inspiration image of a built-in tub with an arch detail. Foster’s interpretation of the arch was finessed to integrate with the home’s mid-century modern style.
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“It was a really traditional bathroom design in the inspirational image, and it didn’t suit the rest of her house,” Foster recalls. “So, we took the arched tub inspiration and modernized it in a way to make it feel a bit more transitional. The style worked with the current mid-century modern house.
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“We wanted to make sure that all your attention was drawn through that arch to the window at the back and the skylight because, ultimately when you walked into the space, we wanted it to feel like natural light was flooding into the space and that bathtub just felt so inviting.”
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For the colour and texture of the materials, the overreaching theme was a calming, beach vibe. Again, considering the mid-century style of the home, Foster eschewed any obvious coastal motifs or nod to seaside living. Rather she mixed textures and hues that are evocative of water and sand — a feature wall of aqua zellige tile over the natural-wood vanity and at either end of the tub, white shiplap on the wall opposite the vanity and creamy tiles on the floor accented with polished nickel hardware and plumbing fixtures.
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“The back wall is just white zellige because we loved the texture of it and how it felt, very much like the flooring, like a sandy beach,” Foster notes. “We’ve got layers of texture. We’ve got the shiplap which is vertical texture. We’ve got floor tile positioned in a diagonal to give that texture.”
