Designers Are Tricking Out the Bathroom—Again

When Susan and Carter Burden’s book-filled apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side was published in Vogue in 1992, a significant chunk of the text was devoted to the unequivocal room de résistance: the bathroom-slash-study appointed by the legendary decorator Mark Hampton.

Two spaces were gutted to allow for the room’s gracious dimensions. “I wanted the room to be very consciously a 19th-century fantasy of the kind that I hope Sir John Soane would have liked,” Hampton told the magazine of the paneled room filled with arches, pilasters, and busts, now legendary among a certain New York school of decorators. Books were stacked bathside, and striped silk lined the walls.

“That fabulous bathroom was a seminal moment for me,” says AD100 designer Miles Redd, who recently conjured his own rendition of a bathroom-cum-study in a family lodge in the Adirondacks, complete with a Randolph Morris wood soaking tub, stone fireplace, and partners desk. “I am always in favor of making the bathroom bigger than the bedroom as I think you move about a bathroom more often,” he says.