Open Shower Designs

Shower enclosures were the in thing a few years back, but now with the introduction of open showers, they are considered a passe. As the name suggests, they are without any walls, doors, curtains, or any other barrier separating them from the rest of the bathroom.

They are used by many a home owners to lend a feeling of luxury and openness to their bathrooms. So, for all those who are planning on building them, given following are some good design ideas.

Open showers need to be built with a lot of planning so that water does not pour out into the rest of the bathroom. Ideally, they should have a minimum six and a half feet area exclusively to them in all directions.

Their floors should be slanted so that the entire water flows into the drain and not towards the bathroom floor. Also, with such designs there is a possibility that the bathroom fittings and fixtures will get wet often, so opt for such accessories that do not get damaged when exposed to moisture for long periods of time.

Lastly, they should never be placed in front of the doors as a person who is bathing can feel cold due to the air which is let in through the bathroom door.

Have the shower head installed in one of the corners of the bathroom, with two adjacent walls serving as a kind of an enclosure for the area. To complete the look, a rectangular, metal frame should be installed in between the adjacent walls, from the floor to just above the shower head in height.

Plans in which there are half walls built around the shower area to separate it from the rest is another option that you can consider. One benefit of having such designs is that it keeps the water from wetting the rest of the bathroom, making it an ideal choice for smaller bathrooms.

For those of you who are planning to install a 'performance showering' system in place, open ones which have a separate compartment will serve the purpose of accommodating the multifunctional shower heads, hand showers, and body sprays in a better way. A good idea for making such open compartments is to have one of the walls of the bathroom extend into a backward curve, only to form a circular or a rectangular area behind it.

As open showers are visible to anybody entering the bathroom, pay special attention to the wall tiles. Make the walls behind and around the shower head as attractive as possible so that the area can be differentiated from rest of the bathroom walls.

Some ideas that you can utilize to accentuate the wall are making a kind of a rectangle on the wall with large tiles, from the floor to a little over the shower head and then using some decorative bathroom ceramic tiles in the middle of this rectangle to give it a different look.

If you have a large bathroom, using river rocks on that wall is another design that you can consider.

To add mystery to the design, creating a walkway which leads to the shower area, with various kinds of tiles, and keeping a number of decorative indoor plants around the bathroom, is something that you can consider. In fact, if you are planning to keep a shower space in your garden, this idea works equally well for outdoor designs.

With the advent of such modern designs, bathing now is not just something that you undertake everyday to keep yourself clean. It has become an enjoyable experience in itself. Something that you undertake to release your day's stress, something that you do to feel one with nature and its most abundant element i.e. water. So, keep this in mind while designing your bathroom, and we are sure that you will come up with your own creative ideas.