The Kitchen Bathroom
Keep the bathrooms you are lucky enough to have! This is New York City! You are not a millionaire!
My mother has this idea about American abundance as measured in the ratio of bathrooms to bedrooms, where the number by which the former exceeds the latter says something about its inhabitants, something like 'we are materialists, vapid'.
My job, then, was to find a way to make the bathroom feel less like a clumsy afterthought.
It came as a bit of a surprise that we ended up with as many bathrooms as we did.
I admit there is something to this, though like any social generalization it's not hard and fast and exists more clearly at the extremes, for instance in the 6-bed, 7.5-bath penthouse of the new Hudson Yards development. Anyway, having long internalized this toilet-based condescension it came as a bit of a surprise that we ended up with as many bathrooms as we did, not through any real effort but rather because of how the house had been used before we owned it.
So while part of me thought it was ridiculous to keep the full bathroom in place in the kitchen, another part - the sensible, dollars-and-cents part - thought that downgrading to a half bath was stupid. Keep the bathrooms you are lucky enough to have! This is New York City! You are not a millionaire!
My job, then, was to find a way to make the bathroom feel less like a clumsy afterthought. My first choice in this regard was to take an angled cut out of the 90 degree corner facing into the room. This increased the floorspace leading into the kitchen and - by creating an unexpected volume - introduced a visibly designed element, lending a much needed sense of intention.
My first choice in this regard was to take an angled cut out of the 90 degree corner facing into the room.
I used scrap underlayment from the flooring to make this, painstakingly cutting down the rough pieces and then filling and sanding away all of the holes and irregularities.
Second, I created a paneled pattern. Darling ingenue that I was, I used scrap underlayment from the flooring to make this, painstakingly cutting down the rough pieces and then filling and sanding away all of the holes and irregularities. That finally done, I added a narrow ledge around the top of the paneling to finish it off. For this I did actually buy some finish-grade pine, rather than using scrap. The idea behind the paneling was to give the projecting wall a reason to be there, an aesthetic quality that would add to the room rather than merely sectioning square footage away. My inspiration was undoubtedly the paneled rooms I’ve been in in Britain, but with a squareness and simplicity that is decidedly more modern.
The third trick for making the bathroom feel intrinsic to the space was to design the pattern of the floor to curve around it. That’s a post for another day, though.
The idea behind the paneling was to give the projecting wall a reason to be there, an aesthetic quality that would add to the room rather than merely sectioning square footage away.
My inspiration was undoubtedly the paneled rooms I’ve been in in Britain.
While part of me thought it was ridiculous to keep the full bathroom in place, the sensible, dollars-and-cents part thought that downgrading to a half bath was stupid.
