Location: Swansea, IL
Our client was an older woman in her 60s who was looking for a bathroom remodel. The décor was pretty, but overall, the design was stuck in the ‘90s.
The house itself was a well-kept ranch-style home located in Swansea, IL, a suburb of St. Louis.
At one point, they had tried to make the master bedroom into a suite, but it ended up looking very dated. I’m assuming she did the sponge painting herself. It had a vinyl sheet floor, which is not really that common anymore.
The main reason they wanted to redo the bath was to enlarge the shower. I think she only kept the tub because the bathroom would have looked empty without it. In its previous incarnation, the bathroom had a big bathtub and a little cave of a shower. She never used the tub, so she felt like the tub took over the entire bathroom, and the shower just seemed too small. As tubs go, the new one is pretty small, but it looks great; nice, clean, and modern.
The truth is, when people are thinking about reselling a house, they often believe that a tub is a necessary item to have in the master, but that’s not necessarily true. I think if you know you’re not going to use it, there’s plenty of other things you can do instead, and you won’t have this thing that’s just taking up space.
Before the remodel, there was a little makeup table, which is something that most people don’t use these days. It had what they call a knee drawer, which is a little indentation with a sort of a desk where you can sit and do your makeup. People today don’t have time for all that like they used to. We find that adding extra storage is a more common request, and that’s what she wanted out of that space. She also kept the single sink instead of going for a double, which accommodated the need for extra storage.
We did a cultured marble shower with a tile accent strip up at eye level. It’s got a nice seat in there, glass doors, and a curbless entry.
Cultured marble is a human-made, resin-based material that we use quite a lot for bathroom countertops and showers. It comes in sheets, and it’s significantly less expensive than tile, at least usually. The panels are three-quarters of an inch thick, and they go up very quickly, so it’s much quicker and less expensive for us to install. We cultured marble panels a lot for hall bathrooms, especially, because it’s so much more cost-effective.
The new bathroom is very modern and sleek-looking. It’s a style that will easily carry through for many years to come. It gave our client the storage and the spaciousness she was after, and it doesn’t scream, “I was built in the 1990s” anymore.
Color-wise, the approach is very similar to what she had before. The stain on the base trim around the tub enclosure, the oak cabinets, it’s not necessarily what we would have done, but that’s what she liked, and it looks very nice.
The faucets, fixtures, and towel bars are a dark bronze matte-finish, a color that’s echoed in the tile accents in the shower.
In the end, the bathroom got a fresh, updated look, and she got the big, beautiful shower and the extra drawer space she truly wanted.
There are some sweet little open shelves above the tub, which she uses mostly for small, decorative items. All in all, it’s very minimal and very clean-looking. The cultured marble gives it a very opulent, high-end hotel kind of feel.
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