Fiona Duke Creates a Wetroom with Vintage Style
Fiona from @fionadukeinteriors
Our second entrant in the Interior Design Challenge is Fiona Duke, who blends her practical knowledge with vintage style. Fiona created a stunning wetroom, maximising the space of a small bathroom perfectly while bringing beautiful design touches.
Read on to hear the whole story.
The Challenge
We’ve challenged three interior designers to unleash their creativity by incorporating the R2 Platform furniture collection into a fresh and inspiring bathroom design. Available in both floor-standing and wall-mounted styles, Platform blends elegance with practicality, offering a choice of handle finishes, ceramic or countertop basins, and open storage configurations for flexible, personalised layouts.
Designers are tasked with showcasing innovative uses of the Platform range, experimenting with layouts, materials, and colour schemes to enhance both style and usability.
Design requirements:
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A complete bathroom concept, including furniture, WC, shower, bath (or both)
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Thoughtful integration of basins, mirrors, brassware, storage, accessories, lighting, and functional features
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A £1,000 budget for tiles, décor, paint, and additional materials
What is the biggest challenge when designing a bathroom?
“When redesigning bathrooms, the biggest challenges are often layout and plumbing. Many older bathrooms have dated layouts, with pipes boxed in or exposed. I usually start with the toilet position, as the soil pipe location heavily influences what can be moved. Keeping it in the same place makes the process simpler."
Fiona's advice? Make sure you know what's possible before getting too far down the line.
The Perfect Platform To Build On
Vintage style in a modern wetroom
As a starting point Fiona chose a stylish tile which also addresses some practical concerns "I chose this porcelain floor tile because it has a very vintage, eclectic feel with a hand-painted, design and lovely soft, ivory, muted tones."
Fiona's experience with designing a wide range of bathrooms across an array of different properties meant she considered things beyond the aesthetic "The floor tile will work really well with underfloor heating because it's 10mm thick, it's very durable and practical to work with, modern underfloor heating. Modern porcelain tiles have reproduced the feel of an encaustic tile in a more, hardwearing easy-to-lay form."
Elsewhere, Fiona softened the room using textures "I wanted to introduce rattan into the mirror and other accessories such as the baskets, because the textures can bring in additional patterns."
"Surfaces in a bathroom have to be easily cleaned which I think can make it feel quite cold. So if you introduce interesting materials such as rattan or other textiles into the room, then it just makes the room welcoming and more inviting or cozy."
Why the Platform Range Worked
The Platform range provided a flexible, stylish centrepiece for Fiona's design "The Platform range was great to choose from because we had so many options for finishes and worktops." She even found a clever method to maximise storage capacity "A singular vanity unit in this range offers a wonderful amount of storage, so putting two side by side means I’ve quickly and easily doubled that."
Advice for renovating your bathroom from Fiona
Fiona's years of experience have given her some unique insight into what can go right, and wrong, when building your bathroom "Your starting point is to decide what you do and don’t need. Do you need a large shower, a bath, or both? How much storage do you need in the room? Make sure you've got your brief outline before starting work, which is basically a list of everything that is essential for you in your new design."
"Once you have your list, then you can look through and think about your layout. Your layout is key to making sure that you'll get everything you want into your bathroom." Being able to place everything you want into a scale drawing helps massively, although plumbing is an important part of the consideration.
"My starting point will be where is the existing toilet located? The soil pipe determines, nine times out of ten, what you can do with the layout, because it can be quite challenging to move."
Fiona's other tips;
- Book your workmen as early as possible
- Order your goods ahead of time, in case you need to wait for stock
- Lighting shouldn't be an afterthought. Having a number of light sources gives you the chance to change the feel of the room from night to day.
Get The Look
See Fiona's chosen items for her design
Fiona Duke
Fiona @fionadukeinteriors
The Platform range was great to choose from because we had so many options for finishes and worktops.
