Why Wirral Homeowners Are Finally Taking Their Bathrooms Seriously

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When was the last time anyone you know had their bathroom done before the kitchen? It hardly ever happens, even though it’s the first room everybody staggers into of a morning, so it’s left with the same beige tiles it had in 1997 and a towel rail that’s been wobbling about for donkey’s years while the kitchen gets new worktops and the lounge gets a new settee. It’s daft really, when you think how much use it gets.

That’s starting to change on the Wirral, though. Over the last couple of years loads of people round here have gone from just slapping on a lick of paint and a new showerhead to properly sitting down and working out what they’d actually like the room to be, and they’re giving it the same love as the rest of the house instead of leaving it till the money’s run out.

What’s Behind the Change

Part of it comes down to practical stuff. There are loads of old Victorian and Edwardian semis on the Wirral where somebody shoehorned a bathroom in decades after the house went up, often into what was once the box room, and if you’ve ever tried towelling yourself off in one of those you’ll know you can barely turn round. A good few homeowners have now twigged that a pokey little bathroom can feel loads bigger once someone’s had a proper go at the layout.

Lockdown played its part too, since being stuck indoors had everybody looking at their four walls and spending on them in ways they never had before, and that hasn’t really worn off. The idea that a house should actually work for the people living in it, and feel nice to spend time in, hasn’t gone anywhere. For plenty of people, the bathroom is now the one spot where they can grab five quiet minutes before the day kicks off, and once it means that much, they’re happy to spend a bit more on it.

Walk-in showers with built-in niches, freestanding baths, underfloor heating and decent lighting that doesn’t leave you looking like you’ve just finished a night shift all used to feel like things you’d only see in show homes or posh hotel rooms. These days they’re going into terraced houses in Heswall and semis in West Kirby.

What Really Makes a Bathroom Feel Luxurious

It isn’t about hunting down the priciest fittings on the market, even though good quality does make a difference. A lot of the time, what makes a bathroom feel special is how it’s laid out and finished, so things like where everything goes, how the light comes in and whether the storage makes any sense at all. Poor planning will drag down even the nicest products every single time.

Storage sounds dull, but it changes how a bathroom feels to use more than almost anything else. If every bottle and tube you own is perched on the side of the bath or shoved under the sink, gorgeous tiles won’t save it. Sorting storage out early on, while the design is still being worked out instead of tacking it on at the end, makes a massive difference.

You’d be surprised how much the materials come into it as well. You can get porcelain tiles these days that look just like stone but don’t need all the scrubbing and sealing, a decent heated towel rail can warm the whole room up instead of just your towels, and a good solid tap has a nice bit of weight to it rather than feeling like it came out of a cracker. It’s not about showing off to the neighbours, it’s just the difference between a bathroom you look forward to using and one that only just about does the job.

Getting the Right Help on the Wirral

The hard part is tracking down someone who can bring all of this together. There are loads of bathroom fitters about, but the list gets a lot shorter once you’re after design-led work that takes your space seriously and will still feel right in ten years. For anyone looking into luxury bathrooms Wirral, Merilyn Phillips is a name that crops up a lot for this sort of thoughtful, start-to-finish design, which is what most homeowners need far more than somebody who’ll just swap the taps over.

It’s also good to know that bathroom projects often take longer than people expect. If you need the work finished by a certain date, the planning chats have to start much earlier than you’d probably guess, because good designers and decent tradespeople get booked up, and rushing the design stage is usually where things start going wrong.

The Wirral has some really lovely homes, and more and more of them now have bathrooms to match. That can only be a good thing, even if it does make those beige 1997 tiles look more and more embarrassing next to everyone else’s.