A midcentury rest room presents a selected renovation dilemma. Intestine it and also you erase the interval character that provides the entire home which means, however depart it as is and also you usually find yourself with one thing too small, too worn, or too rigid for up to date life. The query designers are asking is: How do you honor the soul of a postwar rest room whereas making it livable for in the present day?
The latest restoration of a 1952 Los Angeles residence designed by Paul R. Williams for himself and his spouse (featured in AD’s March 2026 situation) gives a lesson in precisely that steadiness. Williams had a expertise for designing the non-public areas in a house that company often don’t see: dressing rooms with fitted cupboards at precisely the proper top, generously sized bedrooms, and colourful bogs with refined creative particulars. When approaching the renovation, architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena of Escher GuneWardena Structure in Los Angeles discovered themselves confronted with a puzzle on the house’s second ground.
Although the brand new house owners had been dedicated to preserving as a lot authentic element as potential, the first rest room was on the small aspect. To maintain the construction intact whereas offering more room for the lavatory, Escher and GuneWardena made ingenious use of a earlier renovation: Mrs. Williams’s private hair salon. Although not a function that each postwar modernist house is more likely to have, on this circumstance it offered the proper bridge to a brand new, historically-minded interplay for the house’s second ground.
The options they got here up for the 2 bogs apply to any midcentury residence whose bogs deserve higher than a generic refresh.
Let the unique home’s palette lead
Williams was identified for his deft use of shade all through his residential work. Quite than defaulting to the whites and chrome that reads generically as “midcentury,” Escher and GuneWardena pulled from the chromatic sensibility already current in the home. The end result—rose and gray-veined marble, aquamarine Bisazza glass mosaic tile, and deep-blue fixtures—feels period-specific with out being literal reproductions. “The colour scheme makes a reference to Paul Williams’s deft use of shade, as discovered somewhere else in the home and, in reality, all through his profession,” Escher tells AD PRO.
For any midcentury renovation, this means a technique: audit the colours the unique architect utilized in different rooms—whether or not it’s the terrazzo flooring, painted millwork, or tile in secondary bogs—earlier than deciding on a end for the bathtub. The palette is commonly already there.
Select fixtures that really feel of-the-era with out being of-the-archive
The plumbing fixtures within the Williams home, designed by India Mahdavi for Bisazza—together with a lapis-blue bathtub—obtain one thing more durable than it appears: They learn as classic glamour with out wanting like salvage. “The bathtub, sinks, and plumbing fixtures have a basic, timeless magnificence,” says GuneWardena.
