Bathing
The bathroom before six
A bathroom is judged at six in the morning in winter, not in the photograph.
Every bathroom looks good empty and lit for a camera. The test is the first four minutes of a February morning: how cold the floor is, how long the water takes, whether the mirror is fogged, and whether the light makes you look like yourself.
The mirror light, which is the whole room
A downlight above a mirror puts every line on a face into shadow and makes shaving and make-up genuinely harder. It is in perhaps eighty per cent of new bathrooms because it is easy to wire and it looks clean in a photograph.
What works is vertical light at face height, on both sides of the mirror, at 2700 to 3000 K with a high colour rendering index. Two slim wall lights or an illuminated mirror with side-emitting edges. The difference is not subtle: the same person in the same room looks tired under one and normal under the other.
Bath or shower
A freestanding bath is a beautiful object and, in most households, furniture. If it is used less than once a fortnight, it is occupying two and a half square metres of the most expensive floor in the house.
The honest allocation in a main bathroom: a very good shower, generously sized, with two controls so the water can be running before anybody is under it, and a bath only if there is room for both or if somebody genuinely bathes. In a guest bathroom the bath is more defensible, because guests use them and it costs nothing in daily life.
The shower that people notice
Ventilation, honestly
Most bathroom problems are ventilation problems wearing a different hat: mould in the grout, a fogged mirror, paint lifting at the ceiling, a smell that returns. The answer is an inline fan mounted away from the room, ducted properly, running on a humidity sensor with a run-on timer.
It costs perhaps four hundred euro more than the unit that comes with the extractor grille, and it is the difference between a bathroom that is fine in year eight and one that needs redoing.
