For this week’s Five Questions With… I talk to author and restoration consultant Jane Powell about designing and decorating bathrooms to look like early 1900's bungalow bathrooms. Jane has written several books about bungalow design, including Bungalow Bathrooms, which will be out in paperback in August. To see all of Jane’s books and to learn more about her, visit her Web site, JanePowell.org.
1 .What are the essential elements someone needs to have to reproduce the look of early, 20th Century bungalow bathrooms? The classic bungalow bathroom look is almost a cliché—white hexagonal tile on the floor, white subway tile on the walls, clawfoot tub (or a double-wall tub in a niche after 1911), pedestal sink, toilet with a separate wall-hung tank, wooden medicine cabinet, and nickel-plated hardware. A flat wood molding running around the room about four feet from the floor supplies a sturdy mounting place for the towel bars. Sometimes the white tile has a decorative border or feature strip, and in the 1910s was sometimes accompanied by colored edging tiles. In the early 1920s you started to see colored tile (often edged in black) on floors and walls with white fixtures, and after 1926, there's an explosion of colored tile and colored fixtures. But all-white bathrooms persisted through the entire period.
2. Even as bathroom design has changed over the years, what aspects of early period bungalow bathroom style have survived the test of time? The all-white bathroom has become a classic style that is still popular. It can be dressed up with colored towels, rugs, and artwork; or almost everything can be white for a kind of Zen-like spa feeling. Pedestal sinks are still used because they take up less visual space in a small bath. Ceramic tile continues to be popular because it lasts, it's easy to clean, and it has endless design possibilities.
3. Do you find that when buying fixtures, fittings, tiles, etc. for restoring or reproducing the bungalow bathroom look, is it best to search for vintage, antique pieces, or are there companies that exist today that make fairly authentic items? This is absolutely the best time for restoring or reproducing a bungalow-style bathroom, as both vintage pieces and great reproductions are available for all the various bathroom parts. Where once it was difficult to find nickel-plated faucets or hardware, and people had to resort to having chrome pieces stripped to get to the nickel underneath the chrome (chrome won't stick to brass, so plumbing parts have to first be plated with nickel, which the chrome will stick to), they are now widely available, either on the Web, through Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, and at your local plumbing supply.
Subway and hexagonal tile, which wasn't easy to get ten or fifteen years ago, is now available even through giant home centers, and you can even get the perfectly flat tiles (which lack the eased edges of modern tiles) through places like Subway Ceramics, American Restoration Tile, and Designs in Tile. Companies like B&W Tile Co. and Mission Tile West offer 1920s colors like jadite green and orchid, and Mission Tile West even makes reproductions of historic patterned feature strips. I should probably insert a warning here: there were no iridescent glass tiles back in the day—they're lovely, but they have no place in a bungalow bathroom.
Vintage sinks and tubs can still be found at your local salvage yard, on EBay, or for really nice pieces, I like Vintage Plumbing. The difficulty with old ones is finding one where the porcelain is still in good shape—easier with sinks, which don't seem to get as much wear. And you almost have to go with vintage if you want something less common, like a sitz bath. Clawfoot tubs are being widely reproduced, both in porcelain over cast iron like the old ones, and in acrylic models as well. Old toilets are an issue—they look great, but they use six or seven gallons of water to flush, and most jurisdictions now require 1.6 gallon toilets. Until recently, though there were reproductions of Victorian-style high tank toilets, there were no reproductions of old-fashioned toilets with low wall-hung tanks that met the 1.6 gallon requirement, but now there are. Bathroom Machineries offers the "Lydia", a reproduction of a 1910 toilet, and retailers like Mac the Antique Plumber, and Vintage Tub and Bath offer a reproduction pillbox (round tank) toilet made by Sunrise Specialty.
From Rejuvenation you can get appropriate lighting, as well as hardware, towel bars, pushbutton light switches, and wooden medicine cabinets. I've even seen a few nickel-plated sconces at the home centers.
4. What is your favorite bungalow bathroom restoration project you've worked on and why? What were some of the challenges with the project? One of the bungalows I fixed up had an orchid and green tile bathroom—I'm a sucker for colored tile, and the bathroom was a large part of why I bought the house. The shower pan was leaking and had to be replaced, which involved taking out all the mosaic tile on the floor of the shower and two rows of the wall tile as well. The mosaic was an interesting three color basketweave pattern which couldn't be duplicated at the time, so I had to design a new pattern using 1-inch square tiles that still looked old. The wall tile couldn't be matched either—the orchid color was neither rose nor lavender but somewhere in between, and mottled to boot. (I carried a chunk of it around with me for a year trying to find towels to go with it! I finally found some, and actually bequeathed them to the new owners when I sold.) I finally found a green that was close enough to the edging tile color to use in the shower. The other big problem was that the bathtub faucets were leaking—but they were inside a wall with the shower tile on one side and the tub surround tile on the other. I managed to take six of them off, slowly and painstakingly, using dental tools. This was enough to get to the faucet and repair it. The tiles were re-attached using silicone caulk, which will make it easier to remove them in the future. I added a second bathroom as well, using four inch tiles in violet and black, with a black and white hex tile floor.
My other favorite project involved a 1920s bath which had been re-done in the 1950s. It had lemon yellow tile that was just too good to rip out. I made it into an Art Deco bathroom simply by putting in an Art Deco light fixture, a pedestal sink, and adding some black accents with the shower curtain, rugs, and towels. I think the whole project cost about $500—and most of that was for the sink.
5. One of your other books, Linoleum, pays homage to the great colors and looks of vintage linoleum flooring. What are some of your favorite linoleum flooring colors and patterns, and is there a linoleum resurgence going on right now? I'm pathetically grateful to anyone who is a fan of the linoleum book—apparently it was ahead of its time. Probably my favorite vintage pattern is the linoleum oriental rug—I'd probably have one in my dining room if they still made them! All the beauty of an oriental rug with no need to worry about spilled red wine or cat barf—what's not to like? In the currently available linoleum, I like Marmoleum the best. They have more and better colors. I've picked out one called "Rembrandt Palette" to put in my kitchen. I think there is somewhat of a resurgence, but it's based more on linoleum's "green" qualities—it's non-toxic and made from renewable resources, and gets you a few points towards LEED certification. No one seems inclined toward making the fabulous patterns again. I always joke that if I ever win the lottery I will open a linoleum factory.
