Statement Bathrooms
The ultimate luxury is to have a completely over-the-top bathing experience in a beautifully designed bathroom. You might dream of creating a Roman bath-house with wall mosaics, an opulent wood and brass Victorian bathroom or a Moroccan palace effect. I have one word of advice here: once you've started, don't get cold feet - just go for it! Yes, these creations are a little impractical and will only appeal to a limited market. But, in the right house, they will truly fire the imagination of anyone who likes to indulge their eccentric side like yourself.
Eco Bathrooms
There's a lot we can do to make our homes more eco-friendly, and a lot of it can be done in the bathroom. We're each using 70 per cent more water than we did 30 years ago, which is a pretty stark statistic. Just flushing the loo accounts for about 30 per cent of water usage today. Making the endless bathrooms we do have less wasteful is something that's on everyone's minds. It makes good developer sense, too, as people think more about their water bills. Old loos use 9 or 10 litres of water at a time, whereas new dual-flush cisterns use about 6 litres on full flush and 4 litres on short flush - and you can get ultra-efficient loos that short-flush with about 2 litres of water.
A little water-saving action can make a big difference in the bathroom. It's easy to fit aerator taps and low-flow showerheads, which restrict the flow of water without reducing water pressure. Going the whole distance and recycling ‘grey' waste bathroom water demands large water storage areas and careful handling to keep it well away from the mains supply, so it is necessarily complicated. But technology is coming on in leaps and bounds in this area and I'm pretty sure there will be a lot more green options for the bathroom in the near future so keep up to date with developments.
