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With a wide range of toilet designs available, this key but sometimes overlooked feature of your bathroom can actually be made into a focal point in your home, rather than being discreetly hidden away. Indeed, this is exactly what Abbie Mulhall did with her downstairs bathroom when she was doing up her new Dublin home recently.
Having purchased the house as a renovation project and moved in just a few months ago, Abbie has already transformed the property’s interiors, although there is, of course, still more to be done. Having squeezed in a lot of work in a short space of time, Abbie has also been documenting her renovation journey over on Instagram, on her account, @homebymuckylane_.
We subsequently caught up with her to find out more about how things are going – and to chat about one of the most popular items in the house – the toilet.
Abbie chose Bathshack’s Canterbury Traditional High-level Toilet as a feature piece for her bathroom.
With her home a traditional period-style property, Abbie was keen to keep the look of the original features from the house, while also bringing the interiors bang up-to-date for her family.
“The whole house was a renovation,” she said. “The original downstairs bathroom had an old toilet there, so I wanted to keep the style but obviously modernise it. When I went looking for toilets, I found Bathshack and they were very reasonable compared to other places.”
“Bathshack was great. It was all very straightforward and we’ve been recommending them to everybody.”
Opting for the Canterbury Traditional High-level Toilet with White Soft-close Seat, this period-style product combines the elegant style of the past with a sleek contemporary look and has been a hit with both Abbie’s family and friends alike.
“Everybody is just crazy about it in the house,” she said. “They just love to pull the chain. I think it’s the novelty of it.”
The traditional high-level toilet style does, of course, comprise a toilet pan, with the cistern positioned higher up the wall (usually about two metres or more) and connected to the pan by an exposed flush pipe. It’s also characterised by that long pull-chain and is a great example of classic Victorian style.
With a gloss-white finish, the Canterbury Traditional High-level Toilet further comes with a modern soft-close seat, so it won’t slam noisily closed.
With every element of the toilet being something of a feature, Abbie was delighted that the Bathshack high-level model she chose had the chrome flush pipe in a suitable size – something she’d struggled to find elsewhere.
“I wanted the chrome bar to look like a feature but couldn’t find a toilet with the size I wanted,” she said. “I also wanted the cistern to be up high so the chain would be very visible. I love the chain on this toilet – and the design on the handle. A lot of them are really plain, but it actually matches the sink.
“The toilet itself is really high,” she added. “It’s not a standard seat, which is something I really like about it. It’s very much an adult toilet – it’s elegant and classy and different. When I started looking for toilets, I didn’t know there were so many options for high-level styles. I wanted it to be comfortable and thought this one was perfect.”
With the toilet being the focal point in the bathroom, Abbie highlighted this vintage-style piece by tiling the entire wall, top to bottom, behind the toilet, as well as running the same tiles onto the floor. Combining a mustard and navy pattern the tiles are also used as a splashback with the floorstanding pedestal basin at the other side of the room, tying everything together and adding texture and further visual interest.
The basin area also features the mustard and navy tiling.
“You don’t see that often, tiling the back wall and then the floor,” said Abbie. “I wanted it to look like a completely different room, so the colours purposefully don’t match the sitting room. We mixed in some mustard and navy, so it’s really fresh and quite modern. The living room is then decorated in mink and beige and neutral tones, so it’s totally different.”
“It’s a small toilet but it’s a big part of the house.
“Everyone who comes in wants to see the toilet.”
The basin area also features a vintage-style silver mirror, along with a high shelf for bathroom accessories and a chrome towel ring to one side. The tiling, meanwhile, also rises up from the floor at the base of the wall to form an eye-catching border.
“With the tiles, I wanted to keep the traditional look,” said Abbie. “When we chose them, some people said they would have gone with a white tile, but I could envision exactly what I wanted.”
The side walls are subsequently painted in a light-grey tone to make the toilet stand out even further. The overall effect is a vintage look with a modern twist – which is exactly what Abbie was looking for. Indeed, she describes her style as “very vintage-modern.”
“I love old-style mirrors and vintage wallpaper and tiles,” she said. “I think there’s a great twist with what’s in the shops now and I think mixing the two things is just fab. It just has a different look.”
With plans to eventually panel the two side walls – “the old way, with slabs” – she added that the downstairs bathroom was “definitely an interesting room.”
“It’s all about making use of what you have,” she said. “We’re in a standard three-bed house and we opened up the downstairs to make it open-plan. Our toilet is actually just off the sitting room, which is why we needed it to be fab – because people sometimes leave the door open and you want it to look good.”
“Originally, I was going to put the sink in a separate compartment of the room,” she added. “But we left it open because the toilet was so pretty. There’s also a tiny little step up into it.”
With another bathroom upstairs, Abbie chose to style it somewhat differently, installing a pink ‘floating’ (wall-mounted) sink and then pairing this with surrounding marble and white décor.
“We wanted to completely modernise the upstairs bathroom, as we had the traditional one downstairs,” she said. “So, we have an L-shaped bath and brass upstairs, whereas downstairs is done in chrome. We wanted to change it up and have different features in them.
The toilet is accessed via a small step, making it a distinct area within the bathroom.
“In terms of the downstairs bathroom, there are so many toilets out there, but I really wanted to keep the old style of the house, which dates back to the 1930s. I wanted to keep the character of the original pieces – a hint of what it used to be like – and I think we’ve succeeded with that.”
Abbie’s top renovation tip: “Picking one feature in a room is the best thing to do – and then work around that.”
You can follow Abbie’s home renovation journey on Instagram @homebymuckylane_
View our full range of toilets online at bathshack.com
Alternatively, if you have any questions about toilet types, then just email our team at info@bathshack.com, call us on (028) 9077 0188, or use our online chat.
