(BPT) – When you’re ready to create the bathroom of your dreams, it’s no time to chase fads. You want design trends with enduring appeal, concepts that blend luxury, beauty, sensibility and eco-friendliness. Striking the perfect balance between indulgence and practicality can result in a bathroom where you’ll happily spend time getting ready to face the world or decompressing after a busy day.
As you’re planning your bathroom remodel, here are four 2017 bathroom design trends that are as smart as they are luxurious and lovely:
Rediscover cork
Chances are, if cork is already present in your home, it’s part of a bulletin board or nestled in the neck of your favorite bottle of wine. However, cork has many advantages as a design material, and it’s especially appealing in modern bathrooms.
Cork is a beautiful natural material. With a wide variety of colors, grains and textures, each piece of cork is a unique work of natural art. It’s naturally water resistant (although not water proof) and anti-microbial, so it combats mold and mildew in bathrooms. As a flooring material, it’s soft, warm texture is friendly to bare feet.
Finally, cork is exceptionally sustainable; it’s renewable, recyclable and biodegradable, and cork trees need not be cut down in order to harvest the material.
Win with wall-mount toilets
Already widely found in European homes, wall-mount toilets are gaining in popularity in the U.S. Wall-mount toilets offer many design advantages that are both beautiful and practical. Mounting a toilet on the wall allows greater design flexibility, and makes cleaning beneath and around the fixture easy. Great in any size bathroom, wall-mount toilets work particularly well in smaller spaces to create an uncluttered and open visual effect.
Leading manufacturers like TOTO offer wall-hung toilets that feature leading edge technology and eco-friendly elements. The newest addition to TOTO’s line of wall-mount toilets, the MH Wall-Hung High Efficiency Toilet, delivers an elegant appearance, powerful Dual-Max 3D Tornado flushing, a nano-technology glaze that repels waste and reduces the need for harsh cleansers, and a planet-loving 1.28 gallons per flush for solid waste and 0.9 gpf for liquid waste.
Delightful daylighting
The concept of daylighting – using natural light from multiple sources to illuminate a space – has been around for a while, and this is the year to welcome the trend into your bathroom. Incorporating natural light into a bathroom can help reduce electricity consumption, improve visibility, positively affect your mood, balance your internal clock and increase your home’s resale value.
Windows are the most common way to bring sunlight into a room. If your bathroom has an exterior wall that’s lacking a window, consider adding one. Windows with glass blocks or simple frosting on panes can allow you to enjoy sunlight while retaining privacy.
Skylights and tubular skylights are another tactic for bringing daylight into a bathroom. For rooms with direct roof access, professional skylight installation can be a cost-effective way to daylight the room. For ground-floor powder rooms and second-floor bathrooms with an attic above them, tubular skylights use reflective tubes and mirrors to transmit sunlight from the roof into the room.
Wonderful wet rooms
Showers, like TOTO’s Aero Shower System, have been trending toward larger and luxurious for some time now on the bathroom design scene. For a shower that truly stands out in terms of visual impact and luxurious experience, consider creating a wet room. Another bathroom design concept that’s popular abroad, modern wet room bathrooms eliminate shower doors, enhance accessibility, make cleaning easier and create a more expansive shower experience.
To turn your standard bathroom into a wet room, you’ll need to waterproof the walls and floors, and have the floor gently graded to lead to a central floor drain that carries excess water away. Whether you have a large bathroom or a smaller space, the wet room concept can make your bathroom look and feel bigger by eliminating shower stalls, doors and curtains that take up space.
The average mid-range bathroom remodel recoups more than 65 percent of its value upon resale, according to Remodeling Magazine’s Cost vs. Value Report. By choosing design trends that combine good sense with luxurious style, you can create a bathroom that will enhance your enjoyment of your home while increasing your home’s value.
