The Design Journal

Every few years a color palette sweeps through bathroom design and then quietly disappears. Avocado. Mauve. Millennial gray. Sage. Black and white has outlasted all of them, and it has done so for about a hundred and twenty years now, which is roughly as close to a guarantee as anything in this business gets. I specify black and white bathroom designs constantly, and not because I lack imagination. It is because the palette does something structurally useful: it separates the

Most of the bathrooms I am asked to fix are not badly decorated. They are badly laid out. Somebody inherited a five-by-eight box with a tub jammed under the window, a vanity that blocks the door swing, and a toilet you have to shuffle sideways past. No amount of new tile solves that. The layout has to change. The good news is that small bathroom designs with shower configurations have gotten dramatically better in the last decade, mostly because glass got cheaper, curbless dr

Flooring is the one decision in a bathroom renovation that you cannot quietly change your mind about later. Paint gets repainted. Hardware gets swapped. Tile gets demolished. So when clients ask me about bathroom floor tile designs, I try to slow the conversation down, because the pattern on the Pinterest board is usually the least important part of the choice. In Florida the stakes are a little higher than they are elsewhere. We have humidity that never fully leaves, sand th

The bathroom is the most underestimated room in most homes. Smaller in square footage than kitchens or family rooms, it does not get the same attention in design conversations. But bathrooms shape daily life as much as any other room. They are the first space most people enter in the morning and one of the last spaces they use at night. They handle the most intimate routines of the household. And in Florida specifically, they face the highest moisture exposure of any room in