Family Bathroom Refresh - Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

Everything stripped, everything rethought

The suite, tiles, and flooring were stripped back to the walls. The Artex ceiling came down and was plastered smooth before anything else happened, the ceiling sets the tone for the whole room and a skim coat is always worth doing before fitting begins. Large format travertine-effect tiles were laid floor to ceiling throughout in a warm sandy stone tone. Using the same tile across every surface; walls, shower enclosure, and floor, gives the room a cohesive quality that mixed finishes rarely achieve. The grout colour was chosen to complement rather than contrast, so the joints recede and the stone reads as the dominant material. The shower enclosure was built as a proper wet area, tanked and tiled with a ceiling-mounted rainfall head fed through the ceiling void, no exposed pipework, no visible fixings. A brass slider rail and handheld attachment sit on the rear wall alongside a built-in niche with a dark timber surround and warm LED strip lighting underneath, which gives the shower area a presence in the evening that a standard shelf never would.

In Progress

In Progress

On the vanity wall, a dark walnut floating unit with a white stone top carries a square vessel basin and a wall-mounted brass tap, the pipework fully concealed within the wall so nothing interrupts the tile surface. Above it, a round backlit LED mirror throws a warm halo of light across the stone tiles rather than the flat overhead brightness most bathrooms rely on. The heated towel rail is brass to match every other fixture in the room — rail, shower head, slider rail, tap, shelf bracket, toilet roll holder. Keeping every metal surface in the same finish is the detail that separates a bathroom that holds together from one that merely functions. The result is a family bathroom that works as hard as it needs to, looks considerably better than anything that was there before, and has been finished in a way that won't date.