Please help me with colouring design for small bathroom

[MaryHuff]

We're having a new bathroom put in downstairs. It will be fairly small - 1m x 3m - and will have a toilet, basin and shower.I am wanting to have a white & dark grey colour scheme.

What are the tips/tricks for making a small room like this look bigger? Should I have the dark grey on the short walls at either end? Or should I put it in horizontal stripes around the whole room? (And if so, do the stripes need to be narrow?)

[theDreadPirateRoberts]

Smaller tiles - about 10cm rather than standard 15cm. Ditto smaller floor tiles if using. Horizontal stripes sounds like fun - I think with a seriously small room you just have to make it look smart and keep the clutter out.

HTH

[bodiddly]

If you put dark grey on the short walls it will only serve to bring them in towards you. Personally, I would say if you want white and grey then stick to grey floor tiles and maybe a border round the room if you want to break up the white. Alternatively, keep it all white and bring the grey in with towels and accessories!

[thedolly]

I have used white on the short walls to good effect in 3 of the rooms in our house. I know it seems counter intuitive but maybe it's a bit like the 'horizontal stripes actually make you look slimmer' thing.

[bodiddly]

do you definitely want to tile the whole room? You could probably get away with just tiling the shower and painting the rest .. this may help open things up a little as well!

[Joolsiam]

We've just done up a teeny bathroom - a little bigger than yours but barely - long enough for a bath and wide enough to walk past the sink (in an alcove), with the loo on the end wall. Just in case it helps, here is our colour scheme

the suite is white

We went for really big tiles, in a brickwork pattern on two tiled walls - really made the room look bigger as there are fewer lines - less fussy, sleeker I guess. A handful of tiles had a random black and grey diamond shaped inset, just to break things up and add a bit of interest. The sink is a vanity unit with a small black worktop and black doorhandles, white doors

we went for slate grey flooring that looked like diamond shape floor tiles, with lighter grey lines defining the tile shape.

Two walls are a light grey from the Dulux bathroom range - it almost perfectly matches the light grey on the floor and pulls everything together.

I have ordered a slate grey blind for the window.

I'm usually awful at colours, but this really seemed to work The key seemed to be having the wall colour picked up in the flooring

[MaryHuff]

Thanks both for your advice. The reason I am keen on the dark grey is that I had bought some gorgeous tiles previously, when the bathroom was going to be larger, so I'm trying to figure out if I can still use them. Unfortunately they are really large tiles (about 50cm x 10cm), but based on the advice you both give it seems not

Oh well, back to the design drawing board....

[bodiddly]

Are they suitable for use on the floor? If not, you could do a border around the walls 10cm high!

[theDreadPirateRoberts]

Use them sideways for your horizontal stripe - could be fab! I think we get too hung up on smaller rooms. If they're kept clear and clean, how much space do you need? And for a shower-room, cosy is much better than vast [shivers at thought of all those drafts on freshly wet skin]

[MaryHuff]

Ooh - lots more replies as I went and made a cup of tea before finishing my post

This is all really useful, thank you.
Joolsiam - your post has given me some ideas, thank you

thedolly - I might use white on the short walls and the grey tiles on the other wall.

In response to bodiddly, no I don't want to tile the whole room. In fact, I am not really a fan of tiles at all. I bought the grey tiles I love to be a feature for the shower area, and the rest of the room was going to be painted, But now the only way that the plumbng will work is to make the bathroom into a wetroom, which means we need tiles everywhere.

It's really annoying, as I had a very clear mental picture of the old design, and can't get my head round how to design it now that the plans have changed - I think I am mentally attached to the old design too much, and trying to adapt it, whereas I should really just start from scratch.