About Author
Kia Stanford is known for her impeccable eye for detail and her ability to create beautiful and luxurious interiors. Kia has become renowned for her use of exquisite materials, bold colours, and luxurious textures. She has worked with a wide range of clients from celebrities to CEOs. Kia’s signature style is an eclectic mix of modern and traditional, which she combines to create unique and timeless designs. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Living Etc, House & Garden, and Elle Decoration. She believes that each space should be tailored to the individual and their unique style. She is an inspiration to many aspiring interior designers and a testament to the power of creativity and hard work.
Marble and Onyx Bathrooms: Three Projects We Still Love
April 3, 2014
The wonderful part about being a designer is the variety of people you get to design for, from all around the world. Sometimes you forget how good a design is until you go back to it. Searching through old folders, I found these very quick snaps of a marble shower room we designed for clients in Baker Street. That sent me looking for the other bathrooms where marble or onyx did the heavy lifting.
The Baker Street shower room: marble and black mosaic
The bespoke, handmade bathroom units give the room a sleek look and still leave plenty of storage.
The spaces were all extremely limited, but the marble and the black mosaic gave the room an instant wow factor. I still love it to this day.
A Knightsbridge mansion flat: backlit onyx
This was a full refurbishment of a large Art Deco mansion block flat in Knightsbridge, and onyx was the material we built the bathrooms around. In the master suite, a backlit slab of translucent onyx glows warm from behind. Lit like that, the stone stops being a surface and becomes the light in the room.
The internal bathroom was harder. The original plan had a backlit onyx panel at the end of the shower, but the building’s pipework ran exactly where it needed to go. We moved an internal wall 20cm, reclaimed some floor space from unnecessary boxing on site, and got the shower back at the end of the room. We wrote about how that bathroom layout evolved at the time.
There was also a concrete column cutting into one bathroom that couldn’t be moved. Rather than box it in, we recessed an onyx seat beside it and matched it on the other side. The column disappears and the seat looks like it was always the plan. More on the Art Deco details in this flat here.
Getting the marble look with porcelain
Not every bathroom needs real stone to get the look. On this project we used marble-effect porcelain: crisp white with grey veining up to around two-thirds height, and a deep teal above it. Porcelain is tougher, easier to look after and kinder on the budget, and in a busy family bathroom that matters. The dark wood vanity and the globe pendant warm it up so it doesn’t feel clinical.
Upstairs, the shower room sits right under the roof slope. We ran a linear, grey-veined stone-effect porcelain up the walls and across the ceiling of the shower, so the awkward angles read as one continuous shape rather than a problem. Blue vertical tiles behind the toilet add colour, and a frameless glass screen keeps the whole thing feeling as big as possible.
Why we keep coming back to stone
Marble, onyx or a good porcelain version: the same thinking runs through all three. Small, awkward bathrooms are where a strong material earns its place. One confident surface does more than lots of small decisions, and it is the thing people remember about the room years later.
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