Chic Marble Bathroom

The existing bathroom was serviceable and entirely forgettable: beige tiling, a quadrant shower enclosure and a bath squeezed under the eaves. Nothing was broken. It was simply a room nobody wanted to spend any time in.

Everything came out. Tiling was stripped back to the substrate and the studwork opened up so that the pipework could be checked and re-run before anything went back. The quadrant enclosure went with it — a shower over the bath serves the room better than two wet areas competing for floor in a space this size.

The new room is built around large-format veined marble, run across the walls so the veining carries rather than stopping at every joint. Fewer, larger pieces is the harder way to tile a small room — the cuts are heavier and there is no hiding a bad one — and it is the reason the finished room reads as stone rather than as tiling.

A recessed niche was formed within the wall build-up to take bottles without a single surface-mounted shelf.

Under the window sits a dark oak vanity with a 20mm marble top and a countertop basin carved from solid marble, set as a deliberate contrast to the pale walls. A carved basin is a single piece of stone rather than a moulded bowl, and at 20mm the top has enough weight to look like a slab and not a laminate.

The sloping ceiling was worked with rather than fought — the bath sits under the slope, where headroom is least needed.