INTERIORS
LUXURY BATHROOM STYLE AND A UNIQUE DESIGN EXPERIENCE
FROM SALACIA OF LONDON
BY SAMANTHA READY
FOR THOSE WHO HAVE UNDERTAKEN A BUILDING PROJECT OR RENOVATION( OR INDEED ARE PLANNING TO), I’ M SURE THAT YOU WILL – OR WILL SOON – HAVE THE SAME DOUBTS, FEARS AND DECISION-MAKING DRAMAS AS I AND MY STEADFAST BETTER HALF RECENTLY ENCOUNTERED. YET WHILST THE OBVIOUS STRESSES – BUDGET CONTROL, UNEXPECTED STRUCTURAL HURDLES AND INDEED THE RELENTLESS AMOUNT OF DUST( SERIOUSLY, WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM AND WHY OH WHY WON’ T IT GO?) – ARE INDEED ENOUGH TO ROCK EVEN THOSE WITH THE MOST HARDY OF RESOLVES, NONE OF THESE PROVED TO BE THE MOST DIFFICULT ASPECT OF MY BUILD. MUCH TO MY SURPRISE AND HORROR, THAT MANTLE FELL TO BATHROOM PLANNING.
With no less than three to plan, including a dream master bathroom, where my tranquil haven with freestanding bath was under threat from a husband that instead wanted a shower the size of a small country, and a ridiculously tight 12-week timeframe dictated by the imminent arrival of child number three … this was not what I had in mind!
We are all aware of the adage that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses, but more importantly they also make homes.
Where kitchen companies lead the way with a whole host of planning tools, design options, self-build packages and beautiful bespoke tailormade dreams – all of which can instantly be visualised and skillfully realised – it came as a massive planning headache to realise that bathroom concepts were severely lagging behind.
I mean, I had done my research, read the glossy home mags, looked at beautiful bathroom fixtures, taken random photos of hotel bathrooms, carefully, yet hopefully subtly, inspected my friends’ homes and of course spent hours lovingly creating my Pinterest board( albeit to my husband’ s horror), but yet nowhere seemed able to realise my vision and actually create my dream space.
I tried lots of options. DIY stores, which clearly didn’ t have the look nor quality that I was hoping to achieve; a well-known high street bathroom store, which shall remain nameless, had about as much creativity and inspired CAD planning as the concrete foundations of my soon-to-be master suite; beautiful suppliers that had the products but no way of helping me actually see if the vision was just a( bathroom) pipe dream; and I even ventured into the realm of plumbing supply shops, that strange trade-focused domain that would have ultimately had all of the products we needed but were only able to communicate in codes and catalogues.
And then the miracle happened: I found Salacia of London.
Salacia of London was in fact conceptualised from the founders’ own personal painful experiences of bathroom planning, but comes
140