I’ve always been intimidated by powder baths. Not because they're hard to design, but because they have no excuse not to be beautiful.
What’s intimidating to me about that is they are one of the more useless spaces in a home.
Not only are they useless (no shampoo, no razor, no need to store weeks worth of towels, no retainers) but they are a space that get so much attention and heavy design poured into them despite being like I said useless.
It's the design world's version of a controlled experiment. Remove all real life and see what's left. Just design. That’s a lot of pressure.
The powder bath is hard to design because nothing real happens in it. I became interested in a harder question: what if the room with the most program looked the most designed?
Right now, I don’t have a powder room. I live in a 900 SF cottage with my boyfriend, my dog, and a lot of products. We have two bedrooms (one is our office) and one bathroom. The bathroom is like the most over-programed space in the entire house. Two people with actual lives and (I’m proud to say i’ve educated him) actual skincare routines.
When I moved in, the bathroom looked exactly like what it was. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing interesting about it either.
I don’t think I even have photos.
I honestly never thought it could be anything else. So I started thinking about it the way I think about design problems at work. What is this room not doing for me that I wish it would and could I use that problem as a design-driver?
It wasn’t doing anything for me. It just existed.
I could walk into a really good store and want everything I saw and not because any individual object was so remarkable, but because of how they were living together.
My bathroom had none of that. It had stuff (derogatory).
The Merchandising Problem
My best friend once said something so wise it has completely shifted the way I’m approaching my house. She said I had everything I needed, but it just needed to be “merchandised.”
I was shook.
Most bathrooms are the opposite of that. They’re accumulations. Things that needed somewhere to live, finding any available surface, and staying there. The counter becomes a permanent still life of practical objects that nobody arranged and nobody edits.
The powder bath avoids this by having no real life to accumulate. I had to solve it a different way.
How I Powder Bath’d my Life:
A custom floor-to-ceiling shower curtain. Divided in the middle. It was such a focal point it made the room immediately feel ~different. I realized I could do something here. Everyone comments on it when they walk in the room.
Found a vintage Tambour cabinet for $100. I really recommend everyone do this. They’re not just beautiful, but sliding the door is really fun. I did also paint my walls.
Got everything off my countertop with my (now viral) soap dispenser.
Finally, I designed a custom floor-to-ceiling wall niche between two wall studs.
Everything real goes inside it. The toothbrushes, the Gold Bond, the seventeen products that have no other home. Behind a door. Out of sight. Not hidden in shame but contained with intention. The outside of the cabinet gets to be purely what it looks like. The inside absorbs the program.
The room now has a point of view. It has breathing room.
Not because I have a powder bath. I don’t. I have a 900 square foot house with a boyfriend and a dog and all the attendant products and clutter that comes with being real people living a real life.
But I also have a cabinet with a knob I brought back from a trip to Genoa. And every morning when I open it, I remember that I chose this life. That the small things were worth deciding about. That intentional living isn’t a renovation. It’s a practice.
That’s what I was actually going for. Not a powder bath. Something better than that. A room that handles real life and still feels like somewhere worth being.
Maybe that’s what we’ve been getting wrong about beautiful rooms. They’re not beautiful because nothing happens in them. They’re beautiful because someone decided exactly where real life should happen, and where it shouldn’t.
Protect your peace.
Powder bath your life.
How I Powder Bath’d My Life — Shop the Room
The Shower Curtain Setup
Curtain fabric — link
Rods — link
Bracket — link
Clips — link
Split shower curtain liner — link
Curtain pleat tape — link
The Tambour Cabinet (similar options)
Option 1 — link
Option 2 — link
Option 3 — link
Option 4 — link
Option 5 — link
The Viral Soap Dispenser
The $30 one — link
Cool vintage option — link
The Sconce
link
The Mirror (still looking but this is close)
link
The Paint
link
The Robe
link
Bath Mat
link
Towels
link
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