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© Art by Thomas M. Reckert

Bold bathroom design is a popular trend this year, and allows you to express yourself in your home's most private area. Because the bathroom is such a private area with a door to conceal it from the rest of the home, it presents a unique opportunity to create a color palette and style that doesn't have to coordinate with the adjacent rooms.

Bathrooms can deliver stunning design in a small space, and design experts recommend that the smaller the bathroom, the bolder you should be. Some ideas for making a real statement in the bath include metallic paints and wallpapers, marble countertops or granite. Some other ideas include creating a rustic and natural theme in your bathroom with accents like natural stone and sculptural glass. Blue and white are colors that look great in almost any bathroom, and these colors can look great in a spa bath setting.

© Jeremy Levine Design

Top bathroom design for sports centers used by the public features some of the most cutting edge and efficient bathroom and shower facilities to impress their customers. Some of these ideas can also be applied in home bathroom design as well. When considering how to best provide group shower facilities, the first thing to keep in mind is how large an area you have to accommodate a large bathroom facility.

It's always better to provide more extensive facilities than you think will be needed, but you also don't want to go crazy and build a huge indoor public bathroom that will be difficult to maintain. Following the selection of your area, or areas, you should next decide on whether to put toilets and showers together or keep them separate. This decision depends on how much space is available, but in general you want to keep the toilets a good distance from the showers.

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The universal bathroom design movement which began some years ago is still going on despite the recession and housing crash in the US. This movement began with some leading architects and designers who promoted the idea of creating bathrooms with doors wide enough to fit wheelchairs.

Today there is a website devoted to the movement at the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University. According to experts on the subject, the universal design concept saves costs over time because it builds flexibility into a building design that can accommodate people with various degrees of physical disability. This saves time and costs of remodeling later on, whereas retrofitting can run up costs that range widely fro adding $10 grab bars to elevators that cost $40,000. As the Boomer generation gets older, these concepts are taking on a broader application because many of them want to stay in their own homes as long as possible.