There is a particular kind of disappointment that sets in a few months after a bathroom renovation is complete. The room looked exactly right in the mood board. The tiles were perfect. The stone was everything. And yet something is slightly off in a way that is difficult to name, until it becomes obvious: the bathroom was designed for how it looks, not for how it is actually used. This is one of the most common conversations we have with new clients, and it is the reason that thoughtful bathroom design in Melbourne begins not with materials or aesthetics but with a genuinely honest conversation about the household the bathroom needs to serve.
The gap between the bathroom we imagine and the one we live in
Pinterest and Instagram have done something interesting to the way people think about bathroom renovation. They have made it extraordinarily easy to develop a clear aesthetic vision and extraordinarily difficult to think clearly about function. The images that generate the most saves are almost always those of bathrooms that are empty, freshly styled, and photographed in ideal light. They show the bathroom at its most aspirational. What they cannot show is the bathroom at seven in the morning, with two people getting ready simultaneously, wet towels looking for somewhere to go, and a vanity that turns out to have nowhere near enough storage for the reality of daily life.
This is not a criticism of aspiration. Having a clear aesthetic vision is genuinely useful in a bathroom renovation. The problem arises when that vision is pursued without an equally clear functional brief, when the decisions about how the bathroom looks are made before, or instead of, the decisions about how it needs to work. The result tends to be a bathroom that looks exactly like the mood board and functions considerably worse than the one it replaced.
The most satisfying bathrooms, the ones that clients still love ten years after they were designed, are almost always those where the functional brief was as carefully considered as the aesthetic one. Where the storage was designed around what actually needs to be stored. Where the vanity was positioned to allow two people to use it simultaneously without difficulty. Where the shower was sized and placed for how the household showers rather than how a shower looks in a photograph.
Starting with the honest brief
The most valuable thing a designer can do in the early stages of a bathroom project is help the client develop an honest brief. Not the aspirational brief, which tends to arrive fully formed and Pinterest-ready, but the functional one, which requires a different kind of conversation and a different kind of honesty.
That conversation begins with questions that clients do not always expect. How many people use this bathroom, and when? Do they tend to use it simultaneously or sequentially? What is the morning routine? Where do wet towels currently go, and where would it make sense for them to go? Is the bath genuinely used, or has it been included because bathrooms are supposed to have baths? What do you find most frustrating about the bathroom you have now? What has never worked, regardless of which bathroom you have been in?
These questions are not glamorous. They do not lead immediately to conversations about stone selection or tapware finish. But the answers to them determine whether the bathroom that results from the renovation is one that genuinely serves the household or one that looks right and works poorly. The aesthetic decisions can only be made well once the functional ones have been made honestly.
Stone that has warmth in it
Marble is the default luxury bathroom material, and it is easy to understand why. The movement, the depth, the association with a long history of beautiful interiors: there is a great deal to recommend it. But marble varies enormously in its warmth, and the version most commonly specified in luxury bathrooms, the cool, bright white with grey or blue veining, is also the version most likely to contribute to the coldness that makes so many high-end bathrooms feel unwelcoming.
Warmer stones tell a different story entirely. Travertine, with its caramel and ivory tones and its gently pitted surface, brings a warmth that very few other materials can match and that photographs considerably less dramatically than Calacatta marble while feeling considerably more beautiful to inhabit. Limestone in warm honey or beige tones. Sandstone where the environment allows for its softness. Even marble selected from the warmer end of the spectrum, the creamy, biscuit-toned varieties rather than the cool whites, produces a room with a quite different emotional quality.
The finish of the stone matters as much as the stone itself. A honed or brushed finish absorbs light rather than reflecting it, and the visual effect is softer, richer, and considerably warmer than the high-polished surface that reads as luxury in a showroom and clinical in a bathroom. For floors in particular, a honed finish also has the practical advantage of being less slippery when wet, which is not a negligible consideration.
The storage problem and why it is always underestimated
Storage is the single most consistently underestimated element of bathroom design, and the one whose inadequacy is most immediately felt in daily life. A bathroom with insufficient storage does not simply inconvenience its users. It creates a visual accumulation of objects on every available surface that undermines the aesthetic the renovation was designed to achieve. The beautiful marble benchtop disappears under a collection of skincare products. The carefully chosen vanity is obscured by the things that have nowhere else to go.
The problem is not usually a lack of cabinetry. It is a lack of the right cabinetry, designed around what actually needs to be stored rather than what looks correct in a floor plan. A single deep drawer is more useful than three shallow ones for most bathroom storage needs. A mirror cabinet that resolves the storage of daily-use items behind the mirror keeps the vanity surface clear without removing the mirror. A recessed niche in the shower, tiled to disappear into the wall, provides the shelf that every shower needs without projecting from the surface or adding visual bulk.
The most effective approach is to audit what currently lives in the bathroom before designing the new one. What is used daily and needs to be immediately accessible? What is used occasionally and can live behind a door? What has been moved into the bathroom because there was nowhere else for it, and might be better resolved elsewhere in the home? These questions produce a storage brief that is specific and practical, and that specificity is what allows the cabinetry to be designed around real life rather than an idealised version of it.
Vanity positioning and the two-person bathroom
One of the most common functional failures in bathroom design is the vanity that works perfectly for one person and poorly for two. In a household where two people share a principal bathroom and follow similar morning routines, the positioning, the size, and the configuration of the vanity has an outsized effect on the experience of using the bathroom every day.
A double vanity is the obvious solution, but it is not always possible given the dimensions of the room, and it is not always necessary. What matters more than the number of basins is whether two people can comfortably occupy the vanity zone simultaneously: whether there is enough bench space for both sets of daily products, whether the mirror or mirrors allow both people to see clearly at the same time, whether the basin or basins are positioned so that one person using the tap does not obstruct the other entirely.
The height of the vanity is another consideration that receives less attention than it deserves. Standard vanity height sits at around 850 millimetres, but in a household where one person is considerably taller or shorter than the other, a custom height can make a meaningful difference to the comfort of daily use. This is exactly the kind of decision that a renovation designed around the household rather than a standard specification naturally arrives at, and that a renovation designed from a floor plan alone rarely considers.
The bath question
The bath is the element in bathroom design where the gap between aspiration and reality is most dramatic. In the aspirational bathroom, the freestanding bath is used for long, candlelit soaks on weekend evenings. In the real bathroom, it is used occasionally by children, rarely by adults, and serves primarily as a visual anchor for the room and a storage surface for things that have nowhere else to go.
This is not a reason to never include a bath. It is a reason to be honest about whether the bath will genuinely be used and whether the floor space it requires is better allocated to something that will. In a bathroom where the shower is used daily and the bath rarely, a generously sized shower with a fixed screen rather than a curtain, good waterproofing, a rain head and a handheld, and enough space to use it without touching the walls will contribute more to the daily quality of life than a freestanding bath that photographs beautifully and is rarely filled.
The households that genuinely use their baths tend to know it before the renovation begins. If there is a bath in the current bathroom and it is used regularly, there is a good case for including one in the new design. If it is rarely used now, the addition of a more beautiful or more prominent bath is unlikely to change that. Designing the bathroom around the reality of the household rather than the aspiration of it produces a room that is more genuinely enjoyed, and that is a more reliable definition of successful bathroom design than how well it photographs.
Shower design for how people actually shower
Size and proportion
Fixed screen versus curtain
Head placement and water delivery
Wet areas and the towel question
Towels are one of the most reliably underplanned elements of bathroom design. Every household has towels. Towels need somewhere to go after use: somewhere to hang where they will dry properly, somewhere to be stored before use, somewhere accessible without having to cross a wet floor. In a bathroom that has not thought carefully about this, towels end up on door handles, on the floor, over the top of shower screens, and in any other location that presents itself as a temporary solution and gradually becomes a permanent one.
Towel rail positioning is a decision that should be made in relation to the shower and the vanity rather than in whatever wall space remains after everything else has been placed. A heated towel rail that is positioned where it can be reached easily from the shower, without having to step onto a cold floor to get to it, is a small consideration that produces a meaningful improvement in the daily experience of the bathroom. Its size should reflect the actual number of towels the household uses rather than the number that looks proportionate to the wall it occupies.
Floor materials and the reality of wet feet
Bathroom floor selection is another area where the aesthetic decision and the functional one can pull in different directions. A large-format polished stone floor is visually beautiful and deeply impractical in a wet area: slippery when wet, cold underfoot in winter, and unforgiving when anything is dropped on it. A honed or textured finish on the same stone resolves the slip risk and the visual quality of the material at the same time, without any compromise to its warmth or beauty.
Underfloor heating is a consideration that is worth raising early in the planning process rather than late. The cost of adding underfloor heating during a renovation, when the floor is already being lifted, is considerably lower than the cost of retrofitting it afterwards, and the difference it makes to the experience of using the bathroom in Melbourne winters is not trivial. A bathroom floor that is warm underfoot on a cold morning is one of those quietly significant details that contributes to the daily quality of life in a way that is easy to underestimate before experiencing it.
Grout in floor tiles deserves the same consideration it receives in wall applications. A light grout on a bathroom floor will show wear, staining, and cleaning effort in a way that a tonal or darker grout will not. The floor of a bathroom is not a surface that is viewed from a distance. It is a surface that is walked on, knelt on, and cleaned repeatedly over many years, and the grout colour is a decision that needs to reflect that reality rather than the appearance of the floor on the day it is installed.
Ventilation and the invisible problem
Ventilation is the bathroom design consideration that receives the least attention and causes the most problems when it has not been thought about. A bathroom without adequate ventilation accumulates moisture that, over time, damages surfaces, encourages mould growth, and creates a quality of air that is unpleasant to be in. In Melbourne’s climate, where the temperature differential between a hot shower and a cool morning can be significant, the demands on bathroom ventilation are considerable.
The minimum requirement is a mechanical exhaust fan that moves enough air volume to clear the steam from a typical shower within a reasonable time after it ends. The better solution is a fan that is sized correctly for the volume of the room, positioned close to the shower rather than at the opposite end of the room, and ideally connected to a humidity sensor that runs it for as long as moisture is present rather than switching off when the shower does. These are not glamorous considerations, but they are the ones that determine whether the beautiful bathroom remains beautiful over years of daily use.
Melbourne bathrooms and real households
Melbourne households vary considerably in how they use their bathrooms, from the inner-city apartment shared between two working adults with efficient, sequential morning routines to the family home in the eastern suburbs where the principal bathroom is shared between parents and children at the most chaotic hour of the day. Each of these contexts requires a different design response, and neither is well served by a bathroom designed from a mood board rather than a brief.
What bathrooms share is a relationship with the broader home that is worth thinking about carefully. The bathroom that connects to a bedroom with good natural light and a strong indoor-outdoor relationship has different opportunities from one tucked into the interior of a terrace. The ensuite of a contemporary home in Hawthorn or Malvern sits within a different architectural context from the family bathroom of a period home in Carlton or Northcote, and the design should respond to that context rather than impose a vision onto it.
The most successful Melbourne bathrooms we have worked on are those that are deeply specific to the household and the home they belong to. They do not look like the most popular images on any particular design platform. They look like themselves, and they work like the rooms they are.
Working with Jane Gorman Decorators
The studio works with homeowners across Melbourne on bathrooms at every scale and stage, from the early planning of a full renovation to the redesign of a room that has never quite worked. The process begins with the functional brief, the honest conversation about how the bathroom needs to serve the household, and moves from there into the material and aesthetic decisions that make the room beautiful as well as practical.
For clients who have renovated before and found themselves with a bathroom that looks right and works poorly, the conversation is often about identifying what was missed the first time and how to make different decisions this time around. For those approaching a renovation for the first time, it is about building the kind of brief that produces a room genuinely worth living in rather than simply worth photographing.
If you are planning a bathroom renovation and want a room that holds up as well to daily life as it does to a mood board, we would love to hear from you.
Frequently asked questions
How do I make sure my bathroom renovation works for everyday life?
How much storage should a bathroom have?
Should I include a freestanding bath if I rarely use the one I have now?
What is the most common mistake in bathroom renovation briefs?
How does Jane Gorman Decorators approach the functional side of bathroom design?
A bathroom designed for real life is not a compromise on beauty. It is beauty applied to the right problem. Jane Gorman Decorators works with homeowners across Melbourne to create bathrooms that are as considered in their function as they are in their aesthetics, rooms that hold up to daily life and continue to feel right long after the renovation is complete. To discuss your project or book a consultation with the studio, get in touch today.