An ensuite and a main bathroom, Frankston

Two bathrooms in the one job, done together rather than one after the other: a main bathroom with a freestanding bath, and a compact ensuite off the bedroom. Doing both at once is nearly always cheaper than doing them a year apart, because the waterproofing, the plumber and the tiler all turn up once instead of twice.

The window was the client’s find

The main bathroom is built around a small feature window beside the bath. The client found it and asked whether it could work, and it does most of the work in the room: it puts daylight exactly where you want it, at the end of the bath, without giving away any privacy. Nothing else in there needed to be loud after that.

The tiles are 600 by 600

Worth saying plainly, because people assume otherwise when they see the photographs: the walls and floors here are ordinary 600 by 600 tiles. The most common size there is, off the shelf, no bespoke slab and nothing exotic. What makes the rooms look like they cost more than they did is restraint - one tile used everywhere so there is nothing to jar against, fluted fronts on the vanities and the bath, an arched mirror in each room, and brushed gold on every single tap, rail, handle and shower frame.

That is worth knowing before you go shopping. Picking one metal and holding it right through does more for a bathroom than any single expensive thing you can put in it, and it costs nothing extra. The money in a bathroom is better spent on what sits behind the tiles, because that is the part you cannot redo later.

Small jobs get the same process

This is a long way from a new home, and it ran the same way. The trade quotes went to the client before the work started, changes were priced in writing, and the same crew did it who do the extensions. That is the whole argument for how we work: if open-book pricing only applies once a job is big enough, it was never really the way you operate.