be my guest, be my guest, put my service to the test.

well here's a room we haven't seen yet, n'est-ce pa?

its the upstairs guest bathroom. soon to become the 'kid' bathroom as it neighbors up to our nursery, and its also the spot where lots of splish-splashing in the tub will take place by our squirmy bundle of fun.

could it be the floor that first caught your eye? you may already be aware of my love of zebra wood, so the chance to infuse some zeeb love into a couple rooms in this house was too much to pass up.

both our full bath upstairs and our master suite closet [more on that later] were graced with this call of the wild. and at $1.15 per square foot [no lie], the call was pretty loud.

its a click-in laminate flooring and i must say, it gave us a run for our money. installing 1,000 feet of asian hardwood downstairs had nothing on this stuff. we were ready to throw in the towel a few times, but thankfully powered through because i so love the end result. the laminate plank grooves just did not want to cooperate, we had difficult angles in the room to contend with [such as several spots where permanent trim had to be worked around] and since this was toward the end of our process, it was june and felt about 1,000 degrees of hot and sticky in the room.

this is one of those troublesome spots. the water closet.

[kinda looks like toity's been a bad boy, doesn't it? the way we've got him quarantined in there?] we think this pocket-door mini room will be nice for future years....say if there's a brother and sister sharing this space. but[t] yeah, working around the plumbing that connects to the toilet, the doorframe where permanent to-the-subfloor trim needed to be notched around, and again the h..e..a..t.... ugh. not our favorite building memory. if only we had a shot of the two of us crammed in here + soaked with sweat....hmm, too bad.

on to greener pastures!


say, like our vanity fair.

i wanted the mirror in this room to appear like a stand-alone piece rather than a built-in mirror glued to the wall. by using the dark wood stain and making the mirror extra tall and wide, i'm think i achieved the maximum impact look i was going for. the espresso wood contrasts to the cabinets [done in benjamin moore's super white, like the rest of our house's trim]. this was deliberate as i didn't want the mirror and vanity to appear like a built-in set.

even though they are....shhh.

also purposeful was our placement of the hardware in purely horizontal lines. i wanted the lines on the vanity to be unbroken and i feel like this orientation creates three subtle visual lines that are far more pleasing to the eye. normally, the middle two door handles would have been attached vertically but i like to avoid normal where i can! we also used 'feet' on this cabinet to give it a floating, furniture look....vs. just a bank of doors + drawers.

the starting point for this bath was actually what you're looking at right here:

super striking black, white, and grey granite known as bianco antico. biiiahhhhnnnccoooooooohhhhh. so wild. so mesmerizing. so pollock-esque.


you can see why i started pleading for this stuff early on. we were very fortunate in that the countertop shop we worked through for our kitchen, master bath and full bath had one, just ONE slab of this marbled magic left. reason being, its actually one of the weaker granites. all of those amazing black shards and veins you see are weak points and our very own slab even broke in half during installation.

thanks to the fix-it powers of epoxy, we were not completely up a crick when this little disaster took place. we elected to have the shop use black epoxy to basically glue the two pieces back together and now? you'd never know any sort of mishap took place!


now its just a pretty pretty playground for peacock pals like that west third candle + box you see. [isn't the resemblance to thomas paul's design remarkable?]

via coco + kelley

also hanging out on the countertop is one of a few round + square juxtapositions that happen in this bath. this faucet, from the danze parma line. oh and that soap is just a cheeky homage to the zebra flooring that's nearby.

secondly, the lights. another restoration hardware outlet find. cheap lights = happy me.

i just love the crisp corners up top that merge into rounded shades at the bottom. and the sleek chrome base that coordinates with the chrome faucet beneath it.

and third. we already had these oil-rubbed bronze hooks from our last home's full bath, so i figured why not re-introduce them here? i think they fit in seamlessly and they provide just the quietest little contrast with the curtain's border of tiny squares.

last but not least. i'm not a huge fan of towel bars so we hooked ourselves up this time around. these same ikea hooks preside in our bath and i just love how minimal, modern and quirky they look. kinda like metal attennaes or something. they also work marvelously with the west elm chrome tp-holders i snagged for our house at an outlet as well [pictured above].

i still ponder adding a splash of color to this bathroom somehow but as you know by now, i'm a careful editor when it comes to color. so the right idea or piece will have to hit me, to make the cut. [plus let's be honest....a plethora of kiddie toys will soon inhabit that plain white tub!]

to close this post....my favorite thing in the whole room is not actually IN the room. its the view of the lake which lies to the front right of our house.

this window is right next to the shower so while it's far too high for anyone to pull a peeping-tom on guests, it does provide a splendid view for stepping in and out of the tub.

peering out at the snow + ice encrusted lake reminds me of how kevin proposed [on the middle of a similarly frozen lake, at night] and also makes me dream of summer and sunshine....

a view of the loo

i probably spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about this humble room in our house. its the only bathroom on the main floor and i wanted it to pack just as much of a punch as any other space since we'd be using it all the time, as would guests to our casa.

as you may have guessed from other posts, i have a small obsession with lighting fixtures and this was another one that i couldn't tear out of my brain as soon as it entered. i first saw it during the fall 2008 parade of homes in grand rapids, in a gorgeous transitional-contemporary home by insignia builders.

i loved the thought of combining the huge scale of this drum with the small, tall bathroom, and doing double-duty with the striking shade by reflecting it in the mirror. it gives me chills just looking at it!!

unbeknownst to me when we ordered it, a local spot in kalamazoo called the wine loft actually hung this fixture all throughout their bar area and i love that idea too! the ambiance created is mahh-velous.

i'd also really hoped [and possibly begged] to have at least one plumbing fixture in the house be a wallmount since the look is just so sleek + modern. i love the look of this one by danze, floating between the frameless mirror and the square sink.

as for the vanity, our trimmer did an excellent job creating the look of a piece i'd seen in a brochure by über-modern bathroom company porcher. one thing i love is that the 45 degree angled lines cut into the piece complement the criss crossing lines of the pendant above.
[and the zebra print towels i snagged from a pottery barn/west elm outlet just take those lines a step further, into the playful zone]

last but not least, i'm loving the added sheen in the room coming from this little friend.

its a tory burch candle that i admittedly ordered purely for the look of it....and thankfully, we're enjoying the masculine scent of it as well! my knees get weak when i look at tory's lovely logo and the box with its pale gold just WORKS with all the muted colors + shiny objects in the room.

the powder room paint color is a shade by benjamin moore called gray horse, and i'm just so pleased with this particular gray's slight undertone of warm aqua-y green. it is slightly reminiscent of restoration hardware's silver sage, but with the lightly golden shade of the drum it shows as a little warmer.