Whether for style or practicality, bathroom design is no place to fall short. This month, we’ve chosen 14 of our favorite local lavatories that get it right.
By Shea Gibbs, Erika Howsare and Caite White
Let there be light
When Elizabeth Birdsall hired Formwork Design to transform her Western Albemarle house, she asked for a stronger connection between indoors and outdoors. The design included a renovation of an existing house (whose original mishmash style Birdsall jokingly called “Japanese Tudor”), plus construction of a new wing and a glass bridge connecting the two.
“Elizabeth wanted privacy between the public and private parts of the house,” Formwork architect Cecilia Nichols explains. “She likes to have a retreat” for reading and sleeping. Housed within the new wing, the master bedroom and bathroom each have one entire wall made of glass: a sweeping, timeless view of the trees.
The house takes every opportunity to let in light and invite the gaze outside. One result is that it feels much bigger than it is. The rhythmic changes of the landscape have a large presence in the house, from the daily movement of the sun to the slower shifts of the seasons. In winter, leaves fall and reveal the nearby river more fully.
Standing in the master suite, with its massive windows facing west, Nichols says, “As architects, we’re trained to minimize western exposure,” which invites afternoon heat gain. But in this case, “The leaves are a natural louvre.” In winter, the leaves drop and the heat is welcome in.
The bathroom is minimal in its style and neutral in its palette. The bathtub sits near the windows, while a spacious shower in earth-tone tile spans one end of the room. Mirrors over the double sinks reflect the woodsy view.
Birdsall considered adding an outdoor hot tub to her property. But, she says—especially with the big windows open—this indoor tub is close enough.—E.H.
Family affair
When kids (who will be teenagers before you know it) are sharing a bathroom, it better be a hardworking space. A Charlottesville family enlisted Wolf Ackerman to design a bathroom that could serve not two, not three, but four kids—and deliver a modern look into the bargain.
The house, a story-and-a-half structure whose upper floor relies on dormers to bring in light, had previously been renovated downstairs, but, says Dave Ackerman, “the upstairs had never really received that attention.” The firm found a way to fit in a trio of bedrooms plus a shared bath upstairs, by locating bedrooms on either end of the house and placing the bathroom in the middle.
But it’s not just a bathroom. It’s really three separate rooms—two powder rooms flanking a central tub-and-shower space. Each one has its own windows, and frosted glass doors between them allow even more light to circulate. As many as three people can use this bathroom at once, each in privacy.
The clients, says Ackerman, craved real, not plasticky materials. The designers obliged with custom cabinets made from rift-cut white oak—a method of milling lumber that produces a straight grain pattern. There’s white subway tile on the walls, large-format gray floor tiles and a large standalone frosted glass panel demarcating the shower stall. One can walk around either side of this panel to enter the shower.
A linear LED fixture hidden in a recess at the top of the shower wall “creates a nice wash of light down the special tile on that wall,” says Ackerman, “so it’s got a little more sparkle.”—E.H.
Through the looking glass
“My ancestry goes back to the Swiss,” explains homeowner and architect Richard Shank. “Form follows function. It’s got to work.”
A particularly beautiful spot in the Ivy home he shares with his wife, Linda, is one that could have been a throwaway: the hall between the master bathroom and closet. Defined by glass block walls and lit by a skylight running along its length, it’s full of pearly, subtle light, while the big view lies straight ahead through the large windows in the exercise room at the end of the hall.
Not only is the space visually striking, it has a deep quiet—due to the mountaintop location, as well as to a floor built from precast concrete that blocks sound (and contains radiant heating tubes for comfortable temperature control).
Shank says he learned many lessons from his two previous houses and brought them to bear in the technical and aesthetic aspects of this home. “When you design your own house,” he says, “you can design it to live like you’d like to.”—E.H.
Core instincts
The union of opposites—modern and vernacular—is at the heart of this Churchville project. Rightly so, as Fred and Kathryn Giampietro, who collect fine art and furniture, wanted a house that would match their sensibilities while bowing to something larger: the rural landscape that spills out in every direction below the ridgetop site.
It also meant that the design should follow from the character of the materials the clients had selected. Their preferred palette is pared down, but warm and earthy: lots of amber-toned wood, brown fieldstone and buff-colored concrete floors.
Behind the kitchen is what architect Jim Burton (of firm Carter + Burton) calls a “core”: a long wooden box housing bathrooms, utilities, storage and other “introverted” spaces. Wrapping around and above the core is the master bedroom, from which one enters the master bathroom through a walnut pocket door. Inside, small floor-to-ceiling tiles decorate a simple tub while, overhead, a pool of light from high windows falls into the room. It’s as though light, along with stone and wood, has become a material in itself.—E.H.
Barn life
“It’s lovely when sky meets a grassy hill—very clean and minimal,” says Bushman Dreyfus architect Jeff Bushman of this Albemarle project. “If you squint your eyes, it could be Midwestern.”
Within this environment, homeowner Sue Sargeant envisioned an homage to the architectural touchstone of any rural American landscape.
As she and Bushman worked through the concept, it also came to mean, as he put it, “an almost severe geometry.” The house eventually manifested as a pair of barn-shaped sections, slightly offset from one another, joined by a short connecting volume.
Behind the kitchen is a sort of backstage: a combination laundry room, pantry and general storage, lined with cabinets. This is the ligature of the house, the connector between two main sections. The rear “barn” comprises a long hallway from which bedrooms, exercise room and bathroom look onto the wooded eastern property line and a magnificent white oak tree.
“I love taking a shower and looking at the sky and the trees,” says Sargeant. “I wanted to be able to see the stars at night.”—E.H.
In and out
“It was designed from the inside out. Every space was motivated by the experience and the views, and how it fit into the circulation pattern—those daily rituals,” says architect Richard Williams of this Rappahannock County home. The aim was that the clients be “somewhat removed from, but utterly immersed in, the viewshed.”
So, yes, there are big windows, the largest of which locate near what Williams calls “places of repose”: sitting areas, the dining table, the master bedroom. In other spots, like the master bathroom, the views come in with more restraint, like in this space, where a tall, skinny window lets in a sliver of light and a hint of the view beyond.—E.H.
What a view
The westward view from this open, slightly elevated Fauquier County site is magnificent—a far-reaching rural tapestry laced with stone walls and regularly traversed by foxhunts. “The house needed to address that view,” says architect Adams Sutphin. The rear of the home, including living room, kitchen and most of the bedrooms, frames the landscape through many windows and French doors.
The house has a quiet luxuriousness, a result of the clients’ and architect’s careful handling of details, as in the master bathroom, where a continued use of the same custom wide-plank white oak flooring found throughout the house lends unity to the spaces. Walls and trim are, in many rooms, painted the same color. “That kept it calm,” says Sutphin. Statuary white marble tile tops a custom vanity designed by Sutphin and lines the three-side frameless glass shower.
From every room—whether a private guest suite on the first floor or the master bathroom on the second floor with its marble-tiled shower—the outside views beckon with a changing seasonal palette and occasional equestrian passersby.—E.H.
Unifying themes
A tight materials palette unifies this Rappahannock County house designed by architect Jim Burton of Carter + Burton. The black granite from the kitchen shows up in the bathrooms as well; vanities and mudroom cupboards echo the design of the kitchen cabinets; walls are white to allow the Pittingers’ colorful possessions to visually step forward.
Lynn Pittinger built cabinet doors, bedroom furniture and other built-in and freestanding pieces for Pond View. Much of his raw material came from the property—for example, a fallen walnut tree became the bathroom vanities. Simple, clean designs repeat throughout the house, allowing Lynn’s workmanship to shine and unify the home.—E.H.
Color wonderful
What’s an art collector to do about the bathroom? You can’t hang valuable paintings in there. But Don and Allison Innes—who own an impressive collection of American representational art—found a way to bring their passion into even the smallest rooms of their home.
The couple, whose 1949 Rugby neighborhood home was due for a double bathroom renovation, asked Alloy Workshop to come up with designs based on two of their favorite abstract painters. For the small bathroom off the entry hall, De Stijl master Piet Mondrian would be the inspiration. And in the larger master bathroom it would be Gene Davis, member of the Washington Color School, known for his compositions of vertical stripes.
The Mondrian bathroom dances with playful squares and rectangles of primary colors on a white field—all executed in small glass tiles made by the Italian company Mosaico. The color blocks not only reference Mondrian’s geometrically pure compositions, they delineate spaces and features within the room—like a red field marking where one would stand to use the sink, or a yellow pathway leading from shower faucet to drain.
Local soapstone tops the sink counter, and a built-in wall niche handles all the toiletries. Squarish Kohler fixtures are the perfect complement to the tilework.
In the master bathroom—built in 1990 as part of an addition undertaken by the Inneses—a tall ceiling had made for a cavernous feel. The Alloy designers lowered it in most of the room but left it high in the shower area, lending contrast that’s enhanced by daylight from a light tube. From the top of the shower wall, the Davis stripes, in unusual color combinations like green-blue-brown or pink-orange, flow all the way down and across the floor.
This may not be Davis’ biggest canvas (he added similar stripes to streets in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia), but it is certainly a dramatic one. The white-and-gray background for the stripes finds an echo in the Carrara marble countertop, added along with cylindrical metal hardware to update the existing wooden vanity.—E.H.
Say “om”
To the rear of this Park Street house, the master suite is all about privacy and calm. Dark bamboo floors usher you from bedroom to bath, where a freestanding soaking tub “provides deep water and full back support for a relaxing escape,” says architect Candace Smith. The triple window there provides a wide view of the sky, as well as a lower garden, forest and stream.
The shower floor boasts soft river rocks (“to massage tired feet,” says Smith), which are also used as an accent in the tile shower walls and tile wainscot throughout the room. Natural light streams in from the interior window overlooking the tub and from an exterior window within the shower itself.
All in all, this bathroom is for deep relaxation.—C.W.
U win
As homeowners Tom and Jenny Becherer—who head an IT firm together—searched for an architect to design their Western Albemarle house, they perused a book about modern-style farmhouses. “We wanted something that evoked an earlier period, but we liked the clean lines of modern architecture,” says Tom.
They were drawn to a house in the book designed by Washington-based architect Robert Gurney. In particular, they loved a wall of windows in that project, and pointed to that photo when they eventually found themselves meeting with Gurney to begin the design process. “I want my whole house to look like that,” Tom remembers saying.
With light and views as a priority, Gurney arrived at a scheme that would maximize visual contact with the outdoors. The basic design is a trio of pavilions arranged in a U shape.
A glass-enclosed bumpout on the third pavilion makes room for the master bath and adds surprising complexity to the form of the house.
Gurney channeled his clients’ wish for time-honored materials (wood, stone, metal) into a building that’s rigorous in its modernity. “If you look at a lot of contemporary homes, I think they’re cold,” says Tom. In this case, white walls are meant to recede so that the exterior views, entering through sweeping windows divided by black framing in Mondrian-like compositions, can provide color and warmth.—E.H.
One for all
Alloy Workshop’s Dan Zimmerman says the principle of universal design plays out in three ways in the bathroom: technologically, functionally and stylistically. “Universal design allows kids to reach the faucet in the bathroom, or if you are impaired, it allows you to roll into the shower,” says Zimmerman.
In the case of this Charlottesville home, Alloy drastically altered the footprint of the 1980s home’s existing bathroom to accommodate an occupant with compromised mobility.
Stylistically, Zimmerman says a natural material palette seems to jive best with the principle of universal design. Natural stone and tile, soapstone and slate are popular because they are easy to maintain and are durable, he says. Here, color is eschewed in favor of texture: Tiles of various size, format and material complement maple flooring. For added warmth, both physical and perceived, Alloy installed radiant heat into the flooring.—S.G.
Key elements
With plenty of visual interest outside of this Blue Ridge Parkway-situated home, says STOA’s Michael Savage, the design task was to stay out of the way. Both clients and architects wanted a crisp, simple look for the house that would allow the views to dominate.
One means to that end was a tightly limited materials palette. Whereas the original interior featured lots of beige walls, gold faucets and fussy trim, STOA pared it all down to a few key materials. Rich walnut wood plays against dark gray steel, stone and tile, and otherwise nearly everything is white: walls, trim, ceiling and counters.
The house is conceived as a whole, so that the dark gray floor tile in the master bathroom, for example, echoes the hue of a steel fireplace surround and granite hearth a couple of rooms away. “We tried to tie absolutely everything together,” says Savage.
The simplicity of style here makes it hard to overlook the fine craftsmanship that animates each surface. A few special touches provide luxury, like the large tile on the master bathroom walls, with its wavelike relief pattern.—E.H.
Warm layers
Conceived of as a sanctuary, this warm, richly textured space is what design-build firm Alloy Workshop calls a “trapezoidal wet zone”—a rain shower and soaking tub with a sculptural surround for relaxation in a hot bath.
A niche wall—for candles or other bathroom accoutrements—separates the tub and toilet area and ties to the rest of the room with Carrera marble accents also found in the vanity. And, says Alloy designer Kate Tabony, “Penny tiles create an interesting contrast to the calm, smooth finish of the tub and subways tiles.”—C.W.
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