Bathroom design

[Lettherebelight]

Looking for a few ideas on planning a new bathroom from all you knowledgeable people! The bathroom is 3.2x2.9 in a Victorian terrace.

1. Do you think white half-tiling or wood panelling would work with a darker colour above?& if so which would you prefer?
2. The plumber has suggested a layout where along the wall facing the door there would the bath on the left running towards the door, a walk-in shower on the right running towards the wall and the toilet in the middle. Do you think this would look odd? (I can't find any examples to show the layout which makes me think it might be unusual)
3. Any bad experiences of mermaid boards or karndean??

TIA!

My friends have used boards. Absolutely horrible in my view. I would avoid at all costs and very out of keeping in a Victorian house. Ditto half tiles because what you put on the top of the tiles tends to look cheap - eg beading. Either tile everywhere or just behind the shower and the bath.

I would get copies of KBB magazine pronto and start looking at designs. Builders/plumbers do what’s easy for them and are a style free zone because most people built to a low cost rather than style so their experience is limited.

We have panels in our Victorian style bathroom and I love it. The bath is freestanding and the panels go behind the sink and loo too.

I wouldn’t have the dark colour above. We have Mizzle by F&B for the boards and a toning white above. It’s clean and sharp.

The plumber is positioning the loo where the soil stack is I suspect. Where is the sink? If it’s next to the loo, then that’s ok.

That's really helpful, thanks. I love the look of panels and am very tempted by a freestanding bath but worried it will mean water everywhere when DD has a bath.
I thought plain boards might look neat/clean in the shower but so difficult to tell what they'd be like in reality.
For the layout, yes, the toilet basically stays in the current place. The sink would be on the opposite wall to the toilet, in from of the shower.

We’re doing our bathrooms at the moment and our master ensuite is about that size. We’ve got the tiles walk-in shower followed by the bath along one side, heated towel rack on the back wall, and then down the other side we’ve got the loo and then the double vanity (which will hopefully hide the loo from view when you first enter) I thought it might looked cramped but is actually looking quite spacious (see pic below of our room in progress—personally I’m taking the tile that’s on the floor all the way up to the ceiling as I like the sleekness of the single large format tile)

I experience of the flooring options mentioned, but you could always consider wood effect tile if you want wood-like flooring. It’s come a long way in terms of look, plank size and even recreation of the grain, and aside from the feel underfoot is hard to distinguish from the real deal.

I like that layout much more, it will be lovely! In ours, there's not enough space for the shower behind the bath unfortunately.

We are halfway through ours and are In a Victorian.

We had a false wall built to divide our large bathroom which enabled us to have the shower “built into” the wall as well as having a back to wall toilet
The other side is now the utility so we can easily still access the hidden plumbing and useful for washing machine, laundry etc. This also enabled us to box in the bath which means the utility had gained more useful space as the washing machine sits nicely on the other side as well as access to the boiler.

The tiles go ceiling to floor and we have opted for a designer sheet vinyl flooring as it’s easy to clean (no grout to keep clean).

We have a hidden waterfall shower going in and the sink unit going in to the right of the picture. The toilet is in the left with the buttons going on the wall. The grouting still needs to be finished as well as the bath panels.

The boxed in effect on your bath is so good! I love seeing pictures of actual bathrooms. Did you design it yourselves?

Yes we did (well me really as my dh is more of the “do whatever you want” person).

It just means the bath is quite cosy and on the other side I have my small utility as I felt the space in the middle of the large bathroom was not useful space. This way I have a smaller bathroom but better utilisation if space. It also put my fears to rest of having hidden features as it was important should anything go wrong I can easily access it without having to tear apart my bathroom so all plumbing can be easily accessed from the utility and is kept out of sight. With having the fake wall we could have picked any features we wanted- we opted for a large shelf around the bath and two shelves built into the shower for holding shampoo etc.

We are meant to be finishing on Tuesday and the floor goes down in Saturday

We had multiple choices of floor and have gone with a slightly darker sheet vinyl as all accessories are white. The browner floor is our choice, the entire floor cost around £80 as sheet vinyl is quite cheap but again it needed to look good and be easy to maintain and I was sick of cleaning dirt off tiled floors (as well as the fact they are very sloppy when wet!) the grey one does look good but when put beside the tiles for me was just too much grey going on

If you tank the bathroom around the bath and shower, a few splashed from DD will not cause problems. A leaking shower or bath is far more problematic!

I would leave the room as open plan to make it feel sowcious.

In my view don’t mix shower panels and tiles. My wood panel bathroom doesn’t have a shower. My large en suite has everything and is fully tiled with large format tiled as pp suggests above. Again, this makes it look spacious.

It's a leaking shower that's forcing us to change before I've had time to really look around for inspiration