Bland to Beautiful

A long-awaited re-do brings a taste of sweet luxury.

Aah, to live in luxury. Maybe it’s a morning walk across a pearl-white, deep-piled carpet that silently swallows each footfall (and takes hours of vacuuming and spot cleaning). Perhaps it’s a shiny, sterling silver tea set (that must be polished with a toothbrush) for special occasions. Or even a sporty, red Miata (that requires washing, waxing and buffing to keep those admiring glances coming). The “aah” of luxury can pale quickly next to the “ugh” of maintenance work, especially for busy people.

When Pat and Dave Fales first started planning to remodel one of the bathrooms in their four-bedroom, three-bathroom Fairfax Station Colonial home, they weren’t thinking much about either luxury or its maintenance. Mostly, they just wanted a prettier bathroom.

“It was very 80s,” Pat says. With a floor and shower done in 4 x 4 inch almond ceramic tile and the double-sink cabinet in oak, the Fales’ old bathroom looked bland and colorless. “It was ugly,” she says bluntly.

She thought the room needed at least three changes: a higher sink cabinet, a new Jacuzzi to replace the one crowded into the back corner, and a bigger shower. She might have been satisfied with that if serendipity hadn’t stepped in.

Pat, who works in real estate, was handling the sale of the home of Ali Yilmaz, owner of GraniTech Inc., a marble and granite fabrication and installation design firm. She’d seen plenty of bathrooms in her line of work, but never one like his.

Intrigued by the granite slab shower and other features, Pat suddenly realized that the changes she’d considered for her own bathroom weren’t enough. She didn’t want to settle for tastefully updated anymore; she wanted beautiful.

GraniTech gave her stunning. The company also delivered a little luxury as well, and something the Fales hadn’t specifically focused on—the low-maintenance features that Yilmaz says are becoming a trend.

He notes that today’s homeowners are often very busy people, sometimes with both partners working full-time outside the home, “so we want to minimize the maintenance.”

The Fales’ old shower, for example, was replaced with clear sides built around what looks like a single slab of granite. Actually, the stone is four pieces of highly polished green and black Verde Laura granite painstakingly cut and fitted together to go around the Rohl fixtures.

The luxury? It’s large enough for two people and features his and her showerheads with separate water temperature controls for each.

The low maintenance? The shower door is frameless, which leaves nowhere for dirt and mildew to collect. There is no grout to scrub between the pieces of granite. “It’s maintenance free,” Yilmaz says.

The Fales also got their wish to replace the Jacuzzi that nobody used. “We probably used it five times in 17 years,” Pat says. “It was a waste of space.” Standing in its place today is an acrylic, clawfoot bathtub made by Victoria Albert. The clean, white tub stands out against the pinkish-beige walls like a puffy cloud in the sky. Like the shower, the tub has no rim or ornate trim to scrub under and around, just simple, low-maintenance lines.

Paper-white shades match the tub and can cover a whole window or half of it. The leaves and branches of a backyard tree peek through the top of one of the windows behind the tub, giving the bathroom a bit of a treehouse feel.

The awkwardly low sink cabinet in dated oak has been replaced with a higher one in gorgeous solid cherry, topped with a Verde Laura granite counter. The old 4 x 4 inch almond floor tiles have been replaced with 16 x 16 inch “tumbled” beige granite tiles that appear rough-hewn but are actually smooth to the touch. Yilmaz noted that replacing the smaller tiles with larger ones means far less work because there’s less grout to clean.

All in all, Pat says she and her husband are very pleased with their new bathroom. Yilmaz “has a great crew. They’re very customer oriented,” she emphasizes.

The final touch to the Fales’ bathroom doesn’t have anything at all to do with maintenance work or the time constraints of busy people. It’s just a taste of sweet indulgence. GraniTech laid down a pad under the floor that heats it to the desired temperature. It can be set, for example, to start heating at 2 a.m., so that by the time Pat or Dave awaken at 6 a.m., both the floor and the room are heated nicely. All of the pieces came together to create a bathroom beyond what the Fales originally hoped for: a paradise filled with simple comforts that anyone could get used to.

—Diane Ballard