Paola Marella “No doubt about it, I’m renewing my bathroom with Marazzi’s Evolutionmarble stoneware!”

A fine home built in the 1940s, a traditional bathroom with black marble on the floor and pale marble slabs on the walls and splendid tap fittings, all a bit bulky and dated. Finally, a few months ago a leak, which caused water to drip into the home of my downstairs neighbour, gave me the excuse to take a serious look at my dear old bathroom. I redesign lots of people’s bathroom, what should I do with my own?

Imagination... just patch it up or finally make radical changes? After a quick examination, the temptation to create something new and more appealing was irresistible.

So I started to consider the alternatives: rebuild the whole thing at very high cost, or find innovative solutions that would be less expensive but still very attractive?

Innovation that would not leave me broke: I would replace the pipes to deal with the damage and ensure the problem would not recur in the future, and save the lovely tap fittings, just changing the internal mechanisms and redoing the chromium plating.

At this point I had to decide on the look I wanted, meaning the four fundamental points: the tiles, the colours, the counter and the lights ... all vital.

I started with the colour: although very atmospheric, dark colours often make bathrooms look smaller, so I went for a light colour to make the room seem lighter and more spacious.

It was now time to look at the coverings. To repair the piping we had had to make a hole in the floor and had also damaged a few slabs of the wall covering. If we were lucky, we might find a few spares of the material used in the cellar (but they certainly wouldn’t be enough), so it was time to start looking for that marble we liked so much. Here the first problems linked to our budget reared their ugly heads; marble is very expensive today and I couldn’t afford it. So we gave our creativity free rein, analysing all the options available - wood, concrete, resin, ceramics. After careful reflection, assessing the pros and cons and the risk of deterioration over time, including maintenance requirements, once again Marazzi came to our aid with its range of exquisite yet functional products which I had already seen at first hand in the Via Borgogna showroom here in Milan.

We liked the marble-look so we chose the Evolutionmarble line with large tiles, size 60X60, in the Calacatta colour, identical to the natural slabs, and we used this to cover the wet wall (shower or bathtub); we were able to use the range’s mosaic, also in Calacatta colour, in the part directly exposed to jets of water, to clearly define the bathtub area and the shower enclosure, and we used the same large-sized tiles for the floor. At this point, to create an elegant effect we asked the installer to leave the narrowest of gaps between the tiles as he laid them (we didn’t want to be tight-fisted over the bill, but we did want tight gaps, important for the overall effect).

For the other walls, not directly exposed to water, we used a water-repellent paint to create a “ton sur son” shade variation effect, and we painted all the bathroom furniture, in my case the vanity cabinet, in the same colour.

Now we needed some contrast, so we looked for an indestructible, water-resistant material and after examining the offerings of my suppliers I eventually found the counters in Silestone composite; we chose a Wengé-like dark shade, took the measurements of the washbasin we had chosen and then visited the dealer to order what we needed. We now painted our old mirror in the same dark colour to state our design choice even more clearly and, last but not least, we found an attractive light, preferably using LED lamps, to mount on our mirror, a vital feature to help us girls to apply our make-up and our partners/husbands to shave.

To give the final personal touch we looked for an ornamental feature, some steps to accommodate all our collection of old and new perfumes, 
to which we added few nice photos with amusing frames, to give our bathroom the look of a warm corner of the home.

What do you think? Pretty good result, don’t you agree?