10 years ago
Today's modern bathrooms are a vast change from those of times gone by. In the good old days, Grandma and Grandad were lucky to have an external toilet out in the yard and a tin bath hung up in the scullery, to be brought out only of a Friday evening.
Things eventually did get better. Bathrooms and toilet rooms made their way towards being a permanent fixture of many houses now and were serviced by bulky, heavy and unsightly lead and cast iron service pipes.
It wasn't till the 60's and early 70's that the modern bathroom started making inroads, with the birth of the plastic bath, copper tubing and close-coupled cisterns. Those were the days we all went multi-coloured. Hell, at one point during this history, the avocado coloured suite was to be found in over 50% of the houses of the land.
These days though, things are finally looking up. The smaller of Britain's bathrooms were usually converted into shower rooms. And the rapid changes in showering technology has essentially killed the need for a bath in many homes. This also gave birth to the wetroom....
Other homes are going in for the big three changes of the decade. These are: Wet rooms (a walk in shower area with no tray), Natural stone surfaces, and Funky fixtures and fittings. This means now that the modern day product installer has to work within all these mediums and sufficiently know his way around.
This bathroom / wetroom I fitted in Milnrow for example has all of the day's requirements all wrapped up in one, with travertine wall and floor tiling. minimalist fittings, fancy taps and radiator, cabinets, granite cills and worktops, and check out this next photo for something special...
Check out the panel on the ceiling over the bath. If you look hard enough, you might make out the 1000 fibre-optic light strands, that all flash on and off intermittently in a totally random order. Imagine settling down under that for an hour after a long and stressful day. Just like relaxing under the stars.
Or, you could go for a metallic slate look. Again with the fancy taps and radiator (yes, that stainless steel square thing over the head of the bath is a radiator). This was another wetroom I did at a farmhouse in Bacup. The toilet alone cost nearly £2,500. The seat lifts when it sees you coming, it has a heated seat, hot water flushes and bidet facility, and it also has a drier unit, doing away with the need for toilet paper. To flush it, you simply walk away from it.
Of course no wetroom is complete without its shower area and here you can see how the tiled floor drains the surface water away. But this room has even more to offer, a lot more. Wait till you see the sink. It's a glass bowl on a granite surface supported by high gloss white cupboards. Take a look and see...
Yes, believe it or not, that red thing is the sink and tap. Don't worry if you can't quite make them out as this next photo set of a wetroom I did in Chester (yes I get around a bit) has a close-up of the same type of sink. And believe it or not, the most integral part of this next room was the 7 foot by 8 foot by quarter inch solid glass shower screen.
Apologies for the focus, but hey I'm a PadPimper not a photographer. But at least now you can see that sink in action. The lever at the top of the small disc is the on/off/temperature thingy. The tap, in layman's terms.
Again we have all the staples going on in this bathroom, the granite worktops, solid stone tiling etc, but then we have the shower....
If only it were just that little bit bigger, we could have had a car wash. But what about the rest of the fitments? What other surprises could this room have to offer us?
Well apart from the two sinks, toilet, cupboards and granite, this bathroom gives us a taste of home cinema too, with the specially developed wetroom television set recessed into the wall. Admittedly, being a bloke, I would have preferred to have the loo facing the screen, but the customer wanted to watch it from the shower. And with bathrooms like these, it is obvious to see, that the customer is usually king.
This next one from the heart of Cheshire shows just how overboard you can go, should you so desire...
Imagine having that to look at while you're in the bath. It's all solid stone, marble in fact and as the next photo displays, even the bath has its own stone surround too. I have to add that the darker squares were later fitted with self de-misting, bronzed, bevelled edged mirrors too. All the fittings in this room are solid gold plated. The taps, the radiators and even the shower fittings and screen. Oh and there's even a bidet too. Enjoy....
Naturally, some of these bathrooms carry extremes. This last one for example, it came in at a cool £90,000 nearly six years ago. But I suppose that's what it costs these folks to be original. That statue above alone, would probably cost the same as a bathroom that our everyday Joe would consider installing.
And this is why I love my job. It's my little corner of the world where I get to play with the rich and famous elite.
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