Sunnyside Bathroom on Apartment Therapy!

Thank you to Aaron Able at Apartment Therapy for publishing a bathroom renovation I completed for a client in Sunnyside, Queens! Check out the full post.

I had a wonderful client who, as is often the case, became a friend over the course of the project. She came to me initially because there was a serious mold problem in her bathroom caused by a perpetual leak from a neighbor's bathroom upstairs. We toyed with saving certain elements of the original bathroom, but ultimately, we decided a gut renovation would provide her with the new, bright, clean bathroom she wanted, and would dispel all remnants of mold and mildew lurking behind the tiles and under the tub.

As I mentioned in the Apartment Therapy blurb, we worked on a tight budget, but my client was flexible with things that were important to her; she loved the glass tiles and wanted a pocket door to open up the room a bit, so she splurged a little there, but the floor and penny tiles were extremely affordable, she kept her sink/vanity and we took advantage of my trade discount on all the finishes.

Comments from Apartment Therapy readers certainly run the gamut! Most think the bathroom is a wonderful improvement (thank you!) while a few are a little more...critical. Don't get me wrong, I'm open to constructive criticism, but comments like, "this really didn't need that ribbon of penny rounds" are entirely subjective and opinion-based. Of course, everyone has a right to express their voice, but at the end of the day, the final design was a result of the choices and compromises  between my client, the contractor and myself.

Some Apartment Therapy readers protested against ripping out the original tiles. As I wrote in my response to some of the comments, I highly value historic preservation, but it can be quite costly. In this case, the fact that the tiles were old/original did not make them better. Not only were they moldy, but they had seen better days. Additionally, the ceiling and walls were puckered from years of leaking from above, so in order to fully repair the damages, the walls had to be demolished. More importantly, my client wanted a new bathroom, and since it is her house, she has the right to change what she wants! She fell in love with the penny rounds and glass tiles, which made the whole design feel serene and clean. It is her opinion that matters most in this situation.

Here's what the tub area looked like before – does this look worth saving to you? It doesn't to me.


The rest of the bathroom, before:


My client's father, who visits from time to time, has a physical disability that makes small spaces difficult and uncomfortable for him to use. We increased the size of the bathroom slightly widening the door opening and by replacing the traditional swinging door with a pocket door. The addition of the larger door required demolition of one wall, further making the preservation of wall tiles moot.


The quality of workmanship on the tile installation, specifically where the penny tiles changed direction at the corners, caused quite a bit of controversy among AT readers! As I wrote in my brief response, penny tiles are challenging when it comes to changing directions (in this case going from a horizontal border to a vertical one that wrapped around the shower while maintaining the same width for the band). By changing the band to a vertical application, we hit a roadblock at the corners, as they do not come together cleanly.

The offending photo:


If you look closely at the photo below, perhaps it is clear that there is only one direction in which to install the mesh-backed tiles in order to achieve a clean, straight edge. It is even clear in the photo above that the natural tile angle is not at 45 degrees and the two edges just don't meet in the corner!

I spent a couple of hours laying out the different options with the contractor and we came to what we considered to be the best solution. Perhaps there were others, but we decided to cut some of the tiles in order to avoid large areas of tile-free grout. As one of the AT commenters wrote, "nothing is perfect," and while we strive for it, budgets, time and all sorts of other constraints are contributing factors to the final result of a project.

At the end of the day, I was very pleased with the overall transformation, as was my client and her family. It was a successful project and I'm proud of it!



Click on images to see larger versions, or hop over to our website!

Our Headboard Named One of AT's Best of 2010!

Many thanks to Apartment Therapy for featuring our headboard project in it's Best of 2010 series! We got a great mention in the Twenty Projects for a Handmade Home post! The project was originally featured on Apartment Therapy in July, and (of course) we wrote about it, as well.

The other featured projects are outstanding and are definitely worth checking out. My personal favorites:
Weekend Project: Transform A Chair with Decopauge
Originally featured on styleathome.com, this project by Kevin Austin made an unremarkable chair into stand out accessory – see instructions by following the link.

Sailor's Knot Doorstop and Paperweight
This project, originally featured (with instructions) on Design Sponge, took a lot of unnecessary flack for whatever reason, but I think it's clever. We definitely could have used a chic door stop in our last apartment, and I love a good sailor's knot!

DIY Trunk to Rolling Cart Project
This project really needs no explanation. Prop and set designer Dane Holweger created this adorable bar from a vintage trunk and shared a full set of instructions. I want to do this in our new house!

Weekend Project: Give an Old Bench New Life
I've come across a gabillion old benches that could be fabulously chic with a little love (and maybe a little fur?). This is a project that would work for tons of uses: a bench at the front door to sit on and put on/take off shoes, a piano bench, a spare bench that can be pulled up to the dining table when seating becomes tight during entertaining or a bench at the end of a bed to catch blankets kicked off during the night. I can't wait to tackle this one, too!

Thanks again to Sarah Rae Trover at Apartment Therapy for choosing our project – and to Megan (our friend and a favorite recent client) for giving us the heads up on the feature!

Inside John Derian's Home

As a (not-so) closeted voyeur, I'm always creepily peering into people's homes when I get the chance. I am shameless. I look into places with windows at eye level, my own neighbors' apartments, when they open their doors as I walk by, and I love actually being invited into the homes of friends, family and clients. How someone lives is a reflection of some part of their personality and I find it all fascinating. I should be arrested. Kind of. Sometimes a person's home is exactly how I imagine it will be, based on what I know about them. Other times, I am floored by wrong my imagination was. In New York, it's particularly crazy to see how people live because there are so many outrageously rich people who live like complete and utter slobs! And, often, you'd never know it by looking at how they put themselves together. I can't tell you how many apartments or brownstones I've walked into, with very successful owners, expecting luxury for days, only to be met with dirty litter boxes, chipped paint, stained carpets, ripped furniture, faulty blinds – squalor, I tell you! 

So, I love when magazines and newspapers (and blogs!) take us inside beautiful homes, showing gorgeously styled rooms on full-page spreads. And the backstories bring the photos to life. I recently posted about John Derian's collaboration with Target, so I was excited to find Shelterpop's story on his 18th century Provincetown, MA country home, with lovely photos taken by Julia Cumes. See for yourself!

Check out the unexpected use of a wood table in the bathroom at left, and the portrait where a mirror normally goes on the right. Clever! 

Derian kept much of the home's 1930s and 1940s wallpaper, despite their varying states of disrepair. It's a fun effect, making it appear that the owner has uncovered a treasure buried under layers of history (and previous owners' design decisions). 

Derian's home is a calm, paired-down and fairly clutter-free reflection of his shop, which is stuffed to the gills with all kinds of curiosities. It actually has the essence of a house museum: an old home preserved and restored, filled with original period furniture and accessories that serves to show us what life was like in ye olden times (the furniture is always very small!). Derian has managed to keep his home's aesthetics grounded in the 18th century, while subtly (but painstakingly) adapting it to meet current standards and comforts of plumbing and electricity. You would never know how much work he's done – not an easy feat!


For comparison, some images of Derian's shop, courtesy of Apartment Therapy:

Our Bathroom Featured on Design*Sponge!

We are bursting at the seams to share with you our bathroom makeover, which was featured as a Before and After on the esteemed Design*Sponge today! D*S is a daily read for us, and it is a true compliment to be included among their roster of talented, creative designers and DIY-ers. Check out the feature here. Thank you, Kate! 

We thought we'd give you a little back-story, complete with a few more photos, to compliment the D*S piece. Oliver and I love our bathroom. Like, love it, love it. Technically, it's actually nothing special. It's small, it has cheap white tiles on the floor and walls and is outfitted entirely in Home Depot wares. However, in moving to our current apartment, with our happy little bathroom, we left behind our old bathroom, which was like a dark wet cave. There was no ventilation and the light over the medicine cabinet maxed out at 40 sad, sorry watts. We had to rig up a light that sat on the back of the toilet just so I could do my makeup and not look like I was heading to my job at the circus. To conceal the inevitable orange globs of mildewy nastiness we knew would accumulate on the ceiling, we painted that bathroom a deep, zexy shade of deep red....walls AND ceiling. I firmly believe that no amount of white or bland "greige" paint is going to make some small rooms feel big. Some rooms are just going to be small. Embrace it. Make it a jewel box. That we did. And we didn't even mind the darkness so much! Then we moved, and we felt like we hit the jackpot.

In our current bathroom, we have a full-size south-facing window. It lets in glorious amounts of light all day. The subway tiles on the walls are cheap (if our building's contractors get the same prices I do, I suspect the tiles cost something like $0.29 per tile), but they are the very essence of New York classic chic and can be dressed up any which way. A perfect blank canvas. Despite our excitement about it's inherent brightness, our bathroom was a bit cold and sterile with all that white. So, we got busy making it warm and welcoming, while retaining the clean sunny-ness.

Here's what the bathroom looked like when we moved in: 

Don't you just love the blue cast from the gnarly plastic shower curtain-as-curtain? Thanks, previous tenant!

We decided the bathroom was the perfect room to test out painting stripes, which I'd wanted to try out for a while. Full disclosure: when I refer to "we," let me be clear that I art directed like a mo-fo, but Oliver and his extremely kind, talented, patient and handy brother, Josh, did all the actual measuring and taping, guzzling healthy doses of Guinness all the while.  It's a small bathroom, remember? Three's a crowd in there, trust me. This left me free to take photos and fetch beers, so I contributed.

Another disclosure: I am bad at painting interiors. I can paint on canvas nicely. I paint walls like a two year old. I am impatient, what can I say? Oliver allowed me to help paint the second and third coats of stripes over the course of the next two days. 

Once the paint dried and we peeled off the tape, we got to work on accessorizing. I searched high and low for the PERFECT shower curtain. It did not exist in our price range. That overpriced shell of a store, Gracious Home, does, in fact, carry my dream shower curtain for the bargain price of $199. Gee, I wonder why they had to file for bankruptcy? I suppose I could have made by own, but if I'd promised something like that we still would not have a shower curtain. So, I finally found one from Anthropologie that has just enough pattern but still lets in lots of light. 

We solved the privacy issue with translucent window film from Home Depot and two luscious hanging plants that absolutely adore their home in the sun and humidity. 

We did little things, like replace the gross faucet with an affordable, but nicer looking one with ceramic levers, replace the broken flusher, install a hand towel ring, replace the tp holder, all from Home Depot. We also relocated the towel bars, added a little tp storage above the door, and treated ourselves to a super cute toothbrush holder from Rejuvenation. Josh also helped us install a dimmer, which is a real luxury in the bathroom! The painting was a wonderful gift from dear friends who hauled it all the way from Rio for our wedding.

Of course, we styled it up a bit for our photoshoot: 

I brought the WC tile home from a trip to Spain in 1996. I've hung it at the bathroom door of every apartment I've lived in since. This photo also gives you a little sneak peek of our hallway – another bold color/stripe experiment. We'll be sure to post it soon!