Small rooms are harder than big ones. Every millimetre is spoken for, the door swing fights the basin, and the extract has to go somewhere. Planned properly, a two square metre en-suite can feel like a hotel room, and that is exactly what we set them out to do.
Door swings, basin projection, the space you need to actually stand up off a WC. We draw the room to scale before ordering anything, because in a small en-suite a fifty millimetre mistake is the difference between comfortable and unusable.
Wall-hung WCs on concealed frames and short-projection basins buy back floor space and make the room easier to clean. The frame is fixed to structure, not to plasterboard hope, so nothing moves in five years time.
En-suites are usually in a bedroom with no services anywhere near. Pipework and waste runs are planned first, boxed discreetly where they cannot be hidden, and a macerator is only recommended if a gravity waste genuinely cannot be run.
A humidity-sensing inline fan ducted out properly, not a token grille venting into a loft. In a small tiled room with a hot shower, extraction is the thing that decides whether the paint and the silicone survive.
A lit mirror, a cove or a backlit niche does more for a small room than any tile choice. Light bounced off a wall makes a two metre room read as generous, and it goes in at first fix.
Understairs and box-room cloakrooms fitted out with the same care, including the awkward sloping ceilings, so a room most people treat as an afterthought stops looking like one.
A workable shower en-suite generally needs about 1.6 by 1.2 metres once you allow for a 900 shower, a short-projection WC and a small basin. Below that you are into a cloakroom with a WC and basin only. We will measure and tell you honestly which one your space is, rather than squeezing in a shower nobody can use.
Usually not, and we would rather avoid one. A gravity waste run to the existing stack is more reliable and silent, and in most houses there is a route for it once the floor is up. A macerator is the answer when the room is genuinely too far from a stack or below it, and if that is the case we will say so up front.
Adding a second shower to a system that was sized for one can, particularly on an older combi. We check flow and pressure at the quote stage, and if the system will not carry both showers at once we tell you before the work starts rather than after the first morning it is a problem.
Usually yes. Most en-suites take a corner of the bedroom, and if there is a fitted wardrobe wall to build against, the stud can double up and hide the pipework. We set it out on the floor with tape before anything gets built so you can stand in the actual footprint first.
No. Mechanical extraction is acceptable in place of a window, and in practice a good humidity-sensing inline fan clears a small room faster than an opening light ever does. It has to be ducted to outside air, which is where most existing en-suite fans fall down.
A straightforward en-suite refit is around a week. Building one from scratch in a bedroom, with the stud, the waste run, the electrics and the extract all new, is normally two to three weeks depending on how far the room sits from the existing services.
Based in Glasgow and out across the city and the surrounding towns most days, so a look at your room is rarely more than a couple of days away. Further afield in Scotland is no problem for the right job.
Send a couple of photos of your current bathroom and we will come back with ideas and a free quote.