Our Bathroom: Dual Showers, Onsen Style Sit-Downs & A Powder Room

854

Japandi
HDB (BTO)
~700 sqft
2 br
Couple Living

よ！ Welcome to the bathroom. There's two bathrooms and we'll walk you through both of them today. Hitotema.home is a Modern Japanese (not japandi) cozy 3 room BTO, designed to bring traditional elements of Japanese houses into the modern era. Now, first, the common bathroom. Usually, people put up funny or quirky signs and pictures in bathrooms. In keeping with tradition, do you recognise the meme? From the outside, you get half of the meme. To those unaware, it just looks like a Japanese painting.
It's only after you take a seat on the bowl, you get the other half of the meme.
This is the common toilet anyway. For our purposes, it's a guest toilet and powder room. It's a dry bathroom, meaning, no shower. Not having a shower creates lots of room in the already small space, allowing us to build a full-length quartz countertop for the missus to do her makeup, or, for guests to adjust theirs.
One thing we searched really hard for was a partially recessed sink that we liked. Because the counter-top is designed at a tall height (about 88cm from the ground), having a top-mounted sink would make the height too tall. Also, an undercounter sink just didn't have the appropriate look and feel for us. This really large sink with its partially sunken design is fantastic. Having the faucet mounted on the sink itself prevents the countertop from getting wet. Furthermore, having the faucet lever beside the tap head keeps water stains from forming on the top surface of the faucet, which always makes chrome look dirty. This faucet also has an extendable head, which makes cleaning the sink real easy! It can also be flipped over for easy face washing. Let's head over to the master bathroom now.
Before we step into the bathroom behind that bi-fold door, I wanna show you our sink first, which is outside the bathroom. A lovely integrated sink of quartz with its own soap tray sits flush with the rest of the wardrobes. A mirror cabinet above, and a small cupboard below.
Lemme show you the features around this sink. First, a really quirky faucet. Aha, it's leverless. Just a button to toggle the flow of water. Truth is, for handwashing, there's little need to have precise control over the rate of flow of water, so a button works perfectly. Having no lever makes the profile of the tap smaller and in a way, less flashy too.
Next, to the left of the sink is a set of open shelves, playing host to a whole arsenal of haircare gizmos of the missus's collection. I do love how this worked out. Having open shelving means easy access to the different devices without any doors in the way. Yet, from any other view, you wouldn't be able to tell, blending discreetly into the rest of the wardrobes like just another section of it.
Now into the master bathroom we go! If you're here because of the title, lemme show you guys the dual showers. Because of the size of the bathroom, it was impossible to get both shower areas in one picture. In frame, we have the rainshower on the left side of the bathroom.
And on the right, the onsen-style sit down shower. Why a dual shower? It's great. For one, the missus and I never need to fight for the shower use. Also, because the missus showers in lava and I shower in water (or ice, as the missus calls it), we don't have to freeze or burn with our own separate shower areas. Two, the onsen-shower and its seated use is great for doing light laundry, or more importantly, giving our dog a shower. The seat makes shampooing our fluffy dog comfortable, and because of the low height of the bath mixer, the controls are at easy reach. Thirdly, yes, i'm lazy, but sitting down to shower is pretty rad. It really works with the Japanese theme too, but truth is, this design was born from the layout of the bathroom.
So, if you've done a BTO reno before, you'll know that the toilets have 2 water outlet points - a shower outlet point (at regular height), and a sink outlet point (at a low height of around 50cm or so if I remember correctly). What you might not know is, that the sink outlet point doesn't have the same dimensions (the gap between the two pipes) as the shower ones. So, because of the low height of the sink outlet point, creating a sit-down onsen shower was a perfect idea. Also, because no regular shower mixer would fit over the sink outlet point, we bought our bath mixer from Japan, as Japanese bath mixers have adjustable piping at the back to fit any distance between the cold and hot water points. The spin-off benefit is now our onsen-style shower really has the authentic stuff attached to it, stickers and all.
Anyway, other than the dual showers, it's just the toilet bowl. I did choose an extremely large bowl btw, just a personal choice but I must admit it's grandiose to sit on.
That's the end of the tour! If you haven't checked out our kitchen post, do check it out on our profile!