Stories

Fantastic home spaces: the bathroom

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vintagebathroomlove

photo courtesy @vintagebathroomlove

A multitude of Instagram profiles celebrates the bathroom, the quintessential private room. Whether it’s vintage, luxury or restyling tips, boldness and colour often take centre stage in what is, after all, a small space where people can really use their imagination

By now, we all know that the bathroom is the ultimate place for withdrawal and privacy. Virginia Woolf would have been unaware at the time, but the beautiful words she penned for two lectures at Cambridge University in 1928, which later became one of her most widely read books, A Room of One’s Own, are a perfect definition of our private bathrooms today. The ability to play with the bathroom’s constituent elements more than in almost any other home space – and that includes small bathrooms – offers almost infinite and multiple variables. Little wonder the bathroom has become something of an interior design obsession. So many combinations offering such scope for the imagination… Even in the most sober homes with the most clean-cut shapes and colours, the bathroom is a space that offers greater latitude to be interesting. This may partly be ascribed to a resurgence of tiles in all varieties, from coloured to handmade, printed and with irregular finishes, but beyond that, the bathroom offers scope for greater daring, including vintage looks. For example, why not indulge in wallpaper for the bathroom? Or colourful 1970s-style bathroom fixtures? Why not plump for a contrast between the floor and walls, or be bold with accessories and linens? If the rest of the house has to look like more than it actually is at any cost, the bathroom can be completely crazy (or understatedly elegant) without impinging on the overall design balance. Many Instagram profiles are dedicated to bathrooms, telling their tale with a focus on retro taste or providing tips for the best interior combinations to maximize and optimize the space in the room that is, par excellence, the most unique in the home.

Vintagebathroomlove’s bio is an up-front declaration of a mission to celebrate the vintage, tiles and decor from decades past. It is a feast of pastel colours, glass cement, bathroom fixtures matching the walls, and the enemies of all minimalist decorators: bathroom mats around the fixtures, from sink to bidet, including a toilet cover. Matching, ça va sans dire, maybe even in fur (oh, the horror!). Of course, wallpaper warrants a special mention. Often detached from the remaining colour scheme, all things considered, it doesn’t seem like a half bad-idea today. What to say...? It’s a sign of the times.

Vintage_original_bathrooms tells the same story, showcasing bathrooms from a few decades ago. Not just an Instagram like-magnet, this profile offers true inspiration for the private rooms of our own, focusing on the infinite shapes and colours of tiles, turning the simplest bathroom into a little jewels of translucent colour. How could you not fall in love with a bathroom with pink tiles and Veronese green fixtures? Simply impossible...

Bathroom lovers’ Instagram feeds are not just fixated on retromania. Many accounts inspire us to renovate and redesign our bathrooms, not just making them more beautiful but optimizing the space to render it hyper functional. Some accounts exemplify the rather big little pleasure of seeing before and after pictures, prompting us to fantasize about what we could do with whatever square footage we have at our disposal.

 

Smallbathroomdesign is a veritable wellspring of ideas for small spaces that offer so much. The account offers examples of how even a few square meters can contain, say, a sauna or a hot tub… even walk-in style. Bathrooms_of_insta, which brings together the best (according to the account-holder, of course) redesigns in its feed, acts as a kind of inspiration-driven Pinterest. One after another, we see the most disparate genres, from total white to coloured, parquet flooring, walls in marble or clad in simple coloured enamel, in defiance of tiles lauded elsewhere.

Bathroomdesigning is another compendium of more contemporary bathrooms, with an eye on luxury and large spaces in this part of the house to generate dramatic end-results. Who wouldn’t want to sink into a bubble bath while watching the sunset through a large penthouse window? Who wouldn’t like a shower inside a glass cube in the middle of your own lush, private garden? I don’t see any hands up… As ever, the idea is to inspire and offer input accessible to mere mortals by dream-scrolling through these Instagram feeds. Isn’t that kind of what social media is for? To imagine being somewhere else for a while? Or in this case, in a room of your own?

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