Cool Bathroom Remodel Trick Saves Precious Space in the Most Compact of Rooms

On a daily basis, design-build remodelers wrestle with an engaging challenge: how to maximize space through good design. For these artisans, each project presents a fresh opportunity to re-imagine and re-invent to transform how a house and its component parts function. And the bathroom, as the smallest room in the house, is a prime spot for such spatial transformation.

By borrowing a bit from designers' and builders' playbook, we can all benefit from a major space-creating trick for bathroom remodels: the "hidden" shower. Below are four key principles to follow when applying this space-saver to your home or project:

Finish the bathroom so the whole room can get wet. The entire space needs to be able to get wet safely because the conventional, water-containing shower booth is missing with "hidden" showers. And because the material and aesthetic choices you make here will define the look and feel of the remodeled room, this step represents a critical design opportunity. Will your bathroom walls and floors feature a flowing naturalistic mosaic of tile work or express modernist rectilinear precision? Functionally, either approach is fine, as long as the surfaces are impervious to water.

Cleverly place the shower drain and the floor pitch to that drain. If your goal is to maximize the sense of spaciousness in your bathroom, you probably shouldn't plop the shower drain in the middle of the room and pitch the floor steeply to it. That would make the entire room "express itself" as a giant shower, not a bathroom with multiple functions. Instead, strive to tuck the drain in an unobtrusive spot, maybe against a wall. Then pitch the floor just enough to let water flow to it. That way the spatial integrity of the floor plane is left intact and the room feels like a living space, not a skate park.
Hide the showerhead in plain sight. Often the most elegant design solution for placement of the showerhead is to simply hang it from the ceiling, much like you would a light fixture. Above eye level, the hardware effectively vanishes from view.

Add a swinging door. While not strictly necessary, a shower door that swings out at shower time to shield the toilet, especially, can be nice functional addition to the system. And if you select a glass door, it needn't interrupt the visual flow of the wall surfaces when the door is folded away between showers.

Depending on the specific conditions of your space the details of this bathroom remodel trick will vary. But the basic principle holds true: you can save a bunch of space by hiding that shower.