The Chelsea Bathrooms – one master bath, one guest bath – bring the spa experience into client’s home.
The client of our recent Chelsea Bathrooms remodel project lives around the corner from the eco-modern home built recently in Vancouver by Hammer & Hand, with design by Scott Edwards Architecture. As the client watched our team build the structure from the ground up, she was in the midst of planning the remodel of her master bathroom with designer Ronda Haas-Huntze.
“The client was very drawn by what she saw happening over at her neighbors’ place and the quality of our team’s work there,” said Alex Daisley, Project Manager for Hammer & Hand. “She contacted us initially about her master bath, but that quickly grew into doing the guest bath as well.”
All photography by bright designlab.
The master bath features both a shower space (pictured above) and tub area (picture below). Radiant heat warms the floors throughout bathroom and up onto bench and bath surround. The shower sports body washes, custom controls for the adjustable handheld showerhead, and an electric steam-proof mirror.
Speaking of steam, the entire bathroom also acts as a steam room, hence the slanted ceiling. That slope, which took a fair bit of engineering and reframing to accomplish, allows water droplets to run down toward the back-painted glass of the wall, preventing a rain of big drips from the ceiling.
Once the droplets hit the wall, they slide down the Diamond Seal-treated glass, to the tile floor, and into the custom-built trough drain (pictured above).
“The installation of the back-painted glass was a big part of the project, everything had to be so precise,” Alex said. “We measured and re-measured when ordering the pieces, and then measured and re-measured again before installation because it had to fit so perfectly.”
The niche shown above incorporates the same back-painted glass, with electrical built in for bathroom gadgets and lighting. We used custom Duverre hardware (below) for the shower and cabinetry.
The bathroom vanity (below) incorporates cherry cabinets and a Pental granite and marble countertop.
As part of the project, we performed a home performance assessment on the house, which uncovered major deficiencies in the crawl and attic spaces. To address these problems we sealed and insulated the spaces with water blown low-density spray foam and brought ductwork and mechanicals inside the building envelope.
Dealing with steam in the bathroom was a critical piece of the puzzle as well. The transom at the top of the master bath shower door entry (shown below) allows steam to reach a Panasonic, high efficiency, WhisperGreen mechanical venting fan. The unit is sized to deal with the bathroom’s prodigious steam, but it also runs silently at a constant rate to ensure excellent air quality in the house 24/7.
“What began as a bathroom remodel became an opportunity to also address key performance problems in the house,” said Skylar Swinford, lead of our home performance team. “When you’re reframing, or opening up walls, or upgrading plumbing and mechanicals for a remodel, that’s often the perfect time to make cost-effective home performance improvements. After all, you’re already tearing things up. That was the case here, and the result was a dramatic improvement in comfort, efficiency, and indoor air quality for the client.”
The project also gave good attention to the experience of the client’s guests, as these photos of the guest bathroom will attest. Like the master bathroom, this bathroom sports cherry cabinetry, as seen below, but this time with Rocky Mountain hardware.
The centerpiece, though, has to be the teardrops of tile in the shower…
It’s a pattern using an Italian glass tile, available through Pratt & Larson, that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The same tile is used in the backsplash pictured below.
All the wood flooring in the guest bathroom is original and remained in place through the project – none was torn out.
“This was a really satisfying project,” said Alex. “We got to work with some really nice materials to create a stunning pair of bathrooms, and we left the house performing better, too. I’m proud that Hammer & Hand can bring experts in both craftsmanship and building science to each and every project to address multiple issues in one fell swoop.”
– Zack
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