Design Clinic #2: A bathroom to appeal to buyers
- Hannah Ashe
- Oct 28
- 3 min read
This is the second Design Clinic where I solve your design challenges.
Tom sent me these photographs of his bathroom and explained that 'our bathroom is outdated and needs an urgent refresh. The house is currently on the market so we don't want to spend the earth'.
Making changes to help sell a property is a very different brief to designing for your own family needs. Instead you're trying to appeal to as many people as possible, and that can be tricky!
As Tom's home is currently on the market, this makes changing anything even trickier because it needs to be viewing-ready most of the time, and that combined with understandably not wanting to spend too much makes a room like this an interesting challenge.
My first thought is to inject more colour and pattern. This isn't easy because it looks like with the exception of the ceiling, this bathroom is fully tiled. Whilst you can paint tiles, I'm inclined not to suggest this here as it is likely to take too long and may look messy. One quick option could be to use tile stickers on only the dark border strip to inject a brighter colour. Image 2 below shows Zellige effect in bottle green. I suspect the results won't be perfect but for a short term improvement they may help and they are cheap.
I would get rid of the carpet. This will be putting buyers off and shouldn't be too difficult to remove. In its place I would have a decent quality vinyl floor fitted. I like this Lattice Pear Tree Green floor by Harvey Maria (1). At £54 per square metre, it's certainly not the cheapest available, but I think that something like this will lift the room considerably and a decent quality vinyl feels nice and squishy underfoot. It's not a big room so I would imagine you are looking at c.£200 plus fitting for this.
Next, I would replace the shower curtain with a patterned one. Dunelm have some cheaper options, but I really like this floral curtain by Anthropologie (3) and at £68, it won't break the bank and you could take it with you if you're next home requires one.
You could add a blind, and in this case I'd suggest a simple roller blind for ease, but it will require drilling into the tiles and so I'd only do this if you have the right equipment and aren't going to risk cracking the tiles and making things worse! If you did want to go for a blind, I'd suggest a natural fibre material such as this Jute Roller Blind (4) which is £60-£70 depending on the width of the window. Blinds2go have a nicer (imo) flax blind, but they are made to measure so cost a little more with a 10-14 day lead time which may not work for these specific circumstances.
If you're struggling to sell your home, why not book a Rapid Revamp 30-minute video consultation resulting in a list of ways to make your home appeal to buyers. It could be the best £95 you spend when it bags you the sale!
When selling, we ideally want to clear as much clutter as possible and I wonder if something like this Habitat bamboo storage unit (5) might fit the loo rolls and bathtime bits and bobs currently in the two baskets on the floor? You could use it to house another plant on the top in a nice pot, though I note that there are already a couple of plants, which look good and should stay!
I wouldn't change any taps but I would ensure that everything is as sparkling clean as possible. In hard water areas, the limescale really does build up, but with some limescale remover and a good buff, brassware will come up surprisingly well.
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