The Top Finishing Touches For Luxury Bathrooms

The key to great design lies in the detail; and small finishing touches can truly make or break the look and feel of any room. When it comes to bathrooms, these little details can transform the space from a basic washing area to a spa style den of tranquillity – but how best to instil this and upgrade your aesthethic? When planning your luxury bathroom renovation, consider the following…

Spare Space? Install a Sauna!

A sauna is very much considered a luxury here in the UK, but such rooms in the home are very common elsewhere in the world. Saunas can be constructed fairly cheaply in any small spare space, and although ideally will adjoin onto either a bathroom or an outdoor space, can be placed just about anywhere. If a whole home sauna is perhaps a little too much for you, consider instead incorporating the soft wooden textures found in them into your bathroom’s design for a relaxing yet upmarket feel.

Embrace European Glamour

Think of the bathroom you’d expect to find in a luxury Parisian hotel, and you won’t find a more maximalist, opulent contrast to the style most of us decorate our minimalist, clean bathrooms here at home. Yet such decoration immediately feels indulgent and can be done without too much of an investment. Grab a vintage chandelier, use antique furniture for storage and upgrade fixtures and fittings for a really period feel that will allow you to step into another class every time you head for a bath or shower. 

Hang Bathroom Art

While we all hang various pieces of art around the home, very few homeowners every install any in the bathroom. Avoiding the traditional seaside themed pieces that are so readily available, instead curate a look and feel through a few choice prints or paintings and hang wherever they’re unlikely to be in reach of water splash. You can protect paintings with specialist sprays and chemicals and if you’d prefer not to risk drilling nails into walls given the risk of damp, can instead purchase low-cost adhesive strips for easy temporary installation.

Include Natural Timber

Wood panelling, as mentioned above in regards to a sauna, can help provide a soft, warm feeling to a room and helps curate an aesthetic of relaxed spa-style space. Moving away from the clinical and somewhat cold materials usually used in bathrooms and embracing the natural beauty of timber conjures a quiet luxury. What’s more, it can be faked: with wooden-style panels available for wall cladding and even printed wallpaper. Wooden bath tubs are still quite rare but when found are reminiscent of Japanese glamour and wooden-type scents from incense can help you relax.

Ditch Harsh Corners

Designs can be softened with the inclusion of rounded features as opposed the sharp rectangles and squares we all tend to think of when it comes to the fixtures and fittings of bathrooms. Curved bath tubs and shower screens mellow the feeling of the room but if you’d like to go one step further, consider integrating natural soft features such as faux grass or pebbles into the space. Key focal areas for rounded edges rather than cornered shapes are the basin area and the bath, and these can be reinforced by further curved accessories such as mirrors and tables.

Install a Spa Style Shower

Most of us think of a shower as a quick ‘must do’ before or after a busy day, with as little time spent under the water as possible and it really more an errand than a chance to unwind. However, showers can be upgraded to feel more relaxing with the introduction of a hydrotherapy type head, luxury tiles and indulgent shower panels. While we don’t often consider it, there are lots of types of shower available including those designed to relieve muscle pain and those designed to feel like soft rain falling. Lots of models have several settings so you can mix and match to meet your needs at any given time.

Add in some Texture

Alluded to a few times above is the varying textures that can be introduced to a bathroom. Tactile finishes please the senses and in a bathroom, which is so often renowned for smooth, hard surfaces, can come as a welcome surprise. Decreasing the design focus from pure function to include a little form too can help include differing textures and tactile materials to further help those using the space to relax and unwind.

Consider Colour

What colour is predominant in most bathrooms? Of course, it’s white – but harping back to a favoured design choice from decades gone by can help really mix it up. Colourful sanitaryware (that is, your toilet, wash basin and bath/shower) can really transform the richness of a room and is beginning to grow in popularity. As a permanent fixture, you’ll need to be sure that you opt for a hue you love (and that works with several other colours, so you can mix it up when you feel like it), with bathroom designers reporting on increased demand for mustard yellow, teal blues and heritage greens. If you’re not quite sure of which would work for you, consider white sanitaryware with paintable exteriors – then you can change it up as often as you like!

Change Up Grouting

Traditional white grouting between tiles has long been the norm in bathrooms up and down the country but changing it up and opting for a dark colour grouting or even black helps present a more curated feel. Which shade you choose may depend on your tile decoration, but even black grouting against plain white tiles presents an arty look that draws the eye – and very handily, hides mould or discolouration.
Are you in need of inspiration for your luxury bathroom refit? Get in touch with your local Refresh Renovations office and we can help guide you through the whole process, as well as share our expertise and design ideas with you to make the perfect project for you.
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