These two local bathrooms have extra personality
In the midst of your morning rush, you may want to luxuriate in an extra-long shower or wish you could spend hours in your dressing room. When you have the ability to adapt your surroundings to your style, you can add special touches to turn your bathroom into a private haven. Maybe, like Dick Weismann, you look forward to a great shower and good coffee while you get ready for the day. Or maybe you’re like Brenda Isaac, who loves her dressing room so much she does her yoga there. Let’s take a look at how these two Atlantans created bathrooms that help make their daily routines a little easier.
Within arm's reach
Dick Weismann is usually in a rush just like the rest of us in the morning, so when he had the opportunity to make his morning more pleasant, he decided to pamper himself where preparation is most crucial—in the bath.
“By Atlanta standards, it was a small space with a need for lots of creative storage,” says Denise Yama, the designer from Home Depot Expo who worked with Weismann on the project. “Dick and his partner, Richard, came to me with a list of wants. It was a given that he wanted it unique and beautiful. But I needed to add a morning bar, and create more storage for toiletries and a place for the kitty box.” Even Weismann’s two cats have a built-in space for their needs in this customized bathroom.
Part of creating a customized experience is adding or taking away things that other people might find crucial. The big tub that many of us would enjoy as an indulgence didn’t work for Weismann. The original bathroom had a nice garden tub, but he had something else in mind. “I just didn’t have the patience to wait for it to fill,” he says. “And it’s utilitarian to be able to take a shower in a tub as well.”
The tub was replaced with a huge marble shower room big enough for two, with a bench and four Kohler Watertiles on the ceiling. “Other people might not like it, but I love rain showers,” Weismann says.
For him, indulgence also meant having his coffee and some snacks within arm’s reach. Because Weismann lives in a bi-level condo in a larger building, his kitchen isn’t really close enough to dash into to start his morning coffee. Instead, in the water closet, Yama built a morning bar, which is a stacked bar with a coffee maker and accessories, and a refrigerator below. On the other side is shelving for towels, sheets, cleaning supplies and more. When company visits, a stainless steel roll-top can be pulled down over the bar to hide everything from view.
“I think that the bathroom reflects their love of living downtown in the city,” Yama says. “It also brings back their love of travel and the unique things they have seen and admired in other cities.”
The beautiful tile wave pattern moving across the floor actually was inspired by Rio de Janeiro’s unique hand-laid mosaic streets, of which Weismann had a great view from the legendary Copacabana Palace when he vacationed there twice.
Weismann ended up with exactly what he wanted—a haven from the morning rush. “With a well-thought-out bathroom—nice layout, fixtures, surfaces, storage, lighting—I think that I enjoy relaxing, and the morning chores become a pleasurable way to start the day,” he says. “It may be almost subconscious, but I think that beginning your day in a pleasant way is important. It helps set the tone for the rest of the day.”
A likely relationship
Zebra-print carpet, pink marble, silver wallpaper and a limited budget—you might not think these elements would work well together, but Brenda Isaac not only made them work, she immerses herself in them every day.
“I spend the majority of my time in the dressing room,” she says. “I travel extensively with having another home in Jamaica, so I spend a lot of time packing and unpacking in the dressing room.”
To create the space she loves, she first had to figure out how to remodel it without losing all of the 1908 Victorian charm of the home. The last renovation, in the ’80s, left the bathroom with mauve wallpaper that clashed with the pink marble. Isaac wanted to keep the marble, so a close friend, Kevin Grisso, who had worked with her on some ironwork, gave her some advice that led her in the right direction.
“We wanted to add a human element, to draw away from the hard marble, soften the lines and give it more emotion with an animated feel,” Grisso says. They found Matisse-inspired wallpaper with a subtle silver metallic sheen. This allowed Isaac to keep a good foundation and a smaller budget.
That need for a smaller budget almost kept Isaac from buying this dream home in the first place. But she was soon pulled in by the house, originally built by locally famous architect Leila Ross Wilburn.
“From the first time I walked into the door it was an instant love affair,” Isaac says. “Much like falling in love with someone out of your league. You feel like the likelihood of a relationship is not possible, but then the attraction is so strong that you must give it your best try.”
The layout of the home also presented a problem. “When I realized there were two apartments, I started rationalizing how I might make it work,” Isaac says. “I lived in the house for three years without any furniture except for in the kitchen and my bedroom. The dressing room and bath were the next rooms to be furnished.”
Once she was ready and able to start work on the dressing room, she had a few other built-in design elements to overcome. Once again, Grisso offered a direction.
“The overall shape was challenging,” Grisso says. “We had to either minimize the height of the ceilings or make the room look even taller and longer, so we took the hall and exaggerated it to make it more of what it was.” That meant adding stripes and the zebra-print carpet. Why zebra? “Because you don’t have a space like that and do nothing with it,” he says. “A lot of people want to make rooms something they’re not. Why not make it more of what it is?”
All of these dramatic touches create a space that uniquely reflects Isaac’s lifestyle. “I keep a stereo for my iPod on a corner shelf, and I practice yoga there, as well as meditation,” she says. “I like the cozy linear space for yoga, then I go right into the bathroom for long, candle-lit baths.” And last but not least, Isaac’s new shower has space to spare. “The shower is expansive with double showerheads and room for more than one!”
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