Plaster Walls Are the Secret to This Sleek Bathroom Transformation

When former clients of Linda Hayslett of LH.Designs in Los Angeles asked her to come back and renovate a second bathroom in their home, she jumped at the opportunity. Hayslett had previously designed the couple’s primary bedroom and bathroom. Her goal in the new bathroom was to give it a clean, fresh, uncluttered appearance, and to make it flow with the other parts of the house that had just been redesigned.

A highlight of this project—one that Hayslett hopes to replicate in future projects—was creating a concrete look in the bathroom by fabricating plaster walls. Since the wife of the couple was grout-averse, Hayslett had the bright idea to ditch the tile altogether. “Plaster is used on the outside of buildings, so you can still use it on the inside and, obviously, if it’s used outside, it has to be waterproof, because there’s weather outside,” she explains. “I don’t think many people realize it could be used inside for a shower as well.”

Another design win for Hayslett was figuring out how to work with the shower’s low ceilings. “I thought the best way to help with not hitting your head on the shower head is if we had a rain shower head, so we pulled plumbing from the wall and pushed it to the ceiling,” she explains. Hayslett confirms that both she and the clients were really pleased with the end result, and despite not changing the actual footprint of the bathroom, it has a much more spacious feel to it than the original.

The before: “The footprint didn’t change, but it feels bigger now because we took away a weird, awkward vanity, which took up so much space,” Hayslett says. “The tiles were also very thick, which visually took a lot away from the space.”

The inspiration: The clients really wanted a modern beach-spa feel, but they wanted it to go along with their home and what they had done,” Hayslett says. “So that’s basically what I was trying to help achieve for them, as well as going along with the primary bathroom that I had previously done. We wanted it to all be in sync.”