A Bathroom at Seven in the Morning

A Bathroom at Seven in the Morning

A Designer’s Guide to Creating a Beautiful, Functional, and Timeless Bathroom

By Ammie Kim Interior Design

Why this book starts before the tile does

The first question I ask is never about tile. It is: tell me about your mornings.

People are usually surprised by that. They have arrived with a folder of pictures, or a phone full of them, and they expected me to open with something about finishes. Instead I want to know who gets up first. Whether two of you need the mirror at the same time. Whether anyone in the house is tall, or has bad knees, or reads in the bath. Whether the door has ever hit someone.

I ask because a bathroom is not really a room. It is a routine that happens to have walls. And in more than twenty years of designing them, I have never once seen a remodel go wrong at the tile store. It goes wrong months earlier, in a decision nobody noticed they were making.

That is what this book is about. Not the ten prettiest bathrooms I have designed, though you will see a good number of them. It is about the ten places where I have watched projects quietly slip, and what it looked like the times we caught them in time.

You will see more than photographs here. I have included the floor plans, the wall elevations, and the material boards from real projects: the same drawings I hand to contractors, dimensions and product codes and all. I am showing you those because I want you to see that a beautiful bathroom is not a lucky accident of taste. It is the visible part of a great many decisions that were made carefully, on paper, in the right order, before anyone picked up a hammer.

Excerpt from page 5 & 6 from my book “10 Costly Bathroom Remodeling Mistakes - and How to Avoid Them"