Using Nature in Bathroom Design
Bringing the Outdoors into Your Bathroom
It’s a rare person who doesn’t feel a connection to the outdoors. That’s particularly true of a pleasant outdoor scene. We want to feel that connection even when we’re indoors, Which includes when we’re in the bathroom. So it pays to use Nature in bathroom design.
When considering bathroom ideas, the moral one might draw from this is that you want as big a connection with Nature as possible. But things aren’t quite as simple as that. If there are too many focal points in a modern bathroom, the effect can be confusing. If there’s too much openness, this can give rise to the feeling that you don’t have the privacy a bathroom should afford.
Here, then, are some pointers to help you use Nature in your bathroom design ideas. You should end up with a pleasing modern bathroom.
Nature in the Bathroom: Bring Nature in Deep
Natural light actually improves our health and our mood. So provide as much of it as is practical.
Naturally, bringing natural light into a bathroom starts with providing a window or windows to the outdoors. Preferably, you want a lovely outdoor scene replete with green growing plants. But your bathroom design ideas shouldn’t end there. If properly positioned, mirrors will bounce that natural light around and amplify the effect. Reflective materials like chrome, brass, and crystal, all of which can be used in fixtures, will do the same.
Relatively dark cabinetry provides contrast. They prevent the effect created by all that light and shiny surfaces from becoming monotonous.
The catch to installing the windows to let in all that light is that in the bathroom, there will naturally be times when you’d don’t want anyone to be able to see inside. When that’s the case, curtains and blinds can ensure privacy. The latter need not be the rather ugly and starkly function Venetian blinds some of us remember from our childhoods. Products like woven wooden blinds can provide a more interesting and visually appealing alternative. Automated blinds offer easy adjustments to the ambient light, partial views, or complete privacy as desired.
A plant on the windowsill or elsewhere in the bathroom will likewise reinforce that sense of a connection with the outdoors.
Nature in Bathroom Design: Simplicity
If your bathroom remodels ideas involve feeling a connection with the outdoors, you don’t want to fill the bathroom with an abundance of eye-catching details that will keep people from ever looking out the window. Soft neutral colors can be useful in this regard.
But you don’t want your bathroom to remodel ideas to actually make the bathroom look plain and drab. That would be too much of a good thing. Attractive materials, textured materials, and accents of brighter colors can provide the proper balance.
Nature in the Bathroom: Continuity
Between Indoors and Outdoors Ideally, there should be a correspondence between the beautiful natural view outside the window and the interior of the bathroom. You can achieve this through the use of natural materials and by choosing colors that reflect what’s outside.
Nature in Bathroom Design: The Worst-Case Scenario
In terms of using Nature in your bathroom ideas, the worst-case scenario is one in which it’s just not possible to add a bathroom window or the view outside that window is dismally, irredeemably unattractive.
In that case, many of the ideas discussed above can still bring something of the feeling of the outdoors in the bathroom. Additionally, if the house has a splendid view elsewhere, using colors and materials that remind a person of that view can create a pleasing effect and make the outdoors, the rooms in the house that do look out on it, and the bathroom feel like unified parts of a greater whole.
We hope you’ll take this advice into consideration when pondering bathroom ideas. We all spend a fair amount of time in the bathroom, and it might as well be as attractive an environment as possible.