The Water Front

Water Works In most homes, baths occupy a place in the pecking order only one level up from closets. This condominium allowed architect Don McKay to explore the other extreme of what a bathroom can be.

“It’s a huge space,” says McKay. “We almost ran out of program.” His response is a bathing complex that inverts the usual hierarchy, swallowing up the master bedroom and encompassing so many subordinate functions—spa, dressing, laundry—that it’s hard to say exactly where it begins and ends.

The main bath addresses both washing and dressing with an oval lavatory kiosk that wraps an existing structural column in glass mosaic tile and

Freed from ordinary spatial constraints, this bath encompasses several rooms and a spa-like array of functions. Photo: Lara Swimmer sandstone, an ash dressing island, and walls lined with storage. Floor-to-ceiling panels of slump glass enclose and divide a water closet and two-person shower. The spa, across a hallway from the main bath, incorporates a dramatic stainless steel soaking tub and, behind another glass wall, a “spa bath.” Lined with glass tiles and narrow strips of slate, the latter represents perhaps the boldest move in a very innovative plan, combining the functions of steam room, shower, and powder room into a single chamber. Project Credits:
Builder: Krekow Jennings, Seattle; Architect: GGLO, Seattle; Project size: 722 square feet; Construction cost: Withheld; Photographer: Lara Swimmer.

Resources:
Countertops: Dogpaw; Fittings: Dornbracht; Fixtures: Diamond Spa, Duravit, and Porcher; Flooring: Pratt & Larsen and Western Tile & Marble; Paints: Sherwin Williams.

Details In a bath as elaborate as this, one might expect to find more than your average tub. Well, here it is: The two-person stainless steel vessel is surrounded by a moat, contained by a black slate curb, from which rise twin vertical slabs of basalt framed by a stainless steel panel on a wall of sandstone tiles. Water recirculates continuously from the moat to sheet down the face of the basalt. Amid all this inventiveness, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the centerpiece was an off-the-shelf item. “The tub is actually not custom,” says architect Don McKay. “We found it in a magazine.”