Story Boards Help a Home Remodel

By: Clark Turner

11.4.2011

Our favorite room in a house is the bath, so the chance to design four baths is a wish come true— four times over. All the bathrooms are in the middle of being built out, but we wanted to share with you our story boards for each of the baths before the big reveal.

We've got a bath for our guests amongst the bedrooms, a master bath, and a bath off the kitchen. The third would be powder room, but in this case she's got a shower. This is a good thing as it will one day—we hope—be the bath & changing room associated with the pool. (Oprah says if you put it out there in the Universe, it will happen.) There's also a bathroom in the basement which is going to be a real design challenge. It's absolutely tiny, although bigger than the bathroom in my last New York City apartment.

Story boards helped us see everything in one place to be sure it all looked right together. They also became our shopping lists. We found all of the colors, fixtures and inspirations for our project and put them together in one document. We then looked at them for a few days, imagining that the room has already been realized. Through this process we changed our mind about a vanity, became more daring with a wall color, decided to go darker in another room, and realized some fixtures weren’t working together. This helped us save money and spared us another trip to the Home Depot. (We’ve been there maybe 20+ times in a month!)

How do you come up with inspiration for all of these baths? Some guys might pay a visit to Waterworks, pick everything out there and have four baths that were all identical. And that's great. That approach wouldn't work with our budget. Besides, we wanted the baths to each be unique.

Instead, our first stop for inspiration was the iPad. We downloaded the HOUZZ app, which is free, and every dollar counts when you are renovating. There we looked at about five hundred bathrooms. We marked our favorites, took a couple more days and then looked at our picks again. We noticed that almost all the baths we liked had very similar qualities. We both loved the baths with Carrara marble, lots of white, touches of black, and the occasional splash of watery blues. We liked contemporary baths, spartan with blank surfaces. We also liked transitional baths, characterized by more curves and nifty chrome bits and pieces.

Then we discussed the requirements for each bath. We wanted a powder room that was sexy and something our guests would be talking about. We wanted the guest bath to be the most comfortable, familiar and traditional of the three—it already had a bathtub with soft lines which could be re-glazed (major, major savings!). We wanted our master bath to be open and contemporary. Rob wanted to be able to look out the window from the shower. I wanted a floating vanity. We both wanted a major mirror situation, and since this was the bath we would be using every day, it got the biggest budget. Finally, the basement bath needed to feel bright and open because it has no window.

Here are our story boards for the baths.

Oh and we have to give a shout out to our friends at AtlasHomewares.com who hooked us up. Early on, Rob discovered their extensive collection of sophisticated pulls, knobs, house numbers and door bells when he was searching Google with the term “Mid century home.” This pulled up Atlas Homewares’ “U-Turn” collection of pulls and knobs, which were so appealing to us that it drove a lot of inspiration throughout our entire home. We are putting these “U-Turn” pulls on the bath vanities, on all of the kitchen cabinets and drawers, even on the linen closet doors. When you take a look at our master bath, you can see how a knob can inspire an entire bathroom.

Have a look at our story boards. We're seeing the baths come to life right now and we're really excited to show them to you all! Let us know what you think. We love comments.