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After a long day of traveling, there’s nothing quite like the serenity you feel after you finally check in to your room, line up all your toiletries on the gloriously expansive bathroom countertop, and take a hot shower (or bath, if you’re lucky). Hotel designers take extra care to ensure that their bathrooms create a calming experience for guests—which is why they’re a major source of inspiration for our own homes.
Whether you’re looking to tackle a small DIY project or a major bathroom renovation, there are tons of design tricks to steal from the most luxurious, unique accommodations around the world. Here are some of our favorite ideas.
Embrace an Open-Concept Layout
You don’t need to do more to achieve a spa bathhouse feel—you actually need to do less. Instead of throwing up glass walls and curbs around your shower, make the whole room a wet zone by leaving it open. While this will require digging into the floor a bit for proper drainage, you could end up with something as dreamy as this bathroom at Marrakech’s Farasha Farmhouse.
Bathe Yourself in Flattering Paint Colors
Part of the experience of enjoying your bathroom is, well, being naked. Beige-yellow walls reflecting off fluorescent overhead lighting is not exactly a recipe for feeling amazing about yourself, so we suggest going with a dusty pink hue on the walls and a sexy pop of glossy red, seen here in Alice in Wonderland–inspired hotel Cowley Manor, designed by Dorothée Meilichzon.
Swap Your Quartz Counters for Colorful Lava Stone
In other bathrooms at Cowley Manor and at Montesol in Ibiza, Meilichzon introduced some shine with basin surrounds in enameled lava stone. Yes, we’re talking about the same lava rock that comes from a volcano. Except after it’s quarried, it’s cut into slabs and topped with a glaze and fired at a high heat.
Companies like Made a Mano and Pyrolave offer tons of different colors of the superdurable material and will often let you customize your surface to whatever shade you want.
Get Funky With Your Mirrors
Instead of installing an XL sheet of glass or two basic round mirrors, have some fun with your double vanity design. At the Ulysses hotel in Baltimore, Ash Hospitality got theatrical with burl-wood frames that look like vases holding flowers that are actually lights.
Disrupt the Check
Checkered shower tile is all the rage right now, but throwing off the scheme a smidge by putting a random black tile here, another over there, can ensure your space feels unique and timeless. Leave it to Kelly Wearstler, who designed the Downtown L.A. Proper, to remind us of this.
Tidy Up With Mint Green
If you want your bathroom to feel neat at all times but don’t want to settle for white, lean into light shades of green. There’s something about a minty zellige or square tile and chrome plumbing fixtures—as seen in this space at Hôtel de la Boétie in Paris—that tricks the mind into thinking you can skip cleaning day.
Go Monochromatic
In Mauritius’s Salt of Palmar hotel, the showers are done up completely in red square tile, making them a destination in and of themselves. A simple ribbed glass shower screen balances things out, so it’s not too much.
Pair Two Bold Colors
When it comes to color, why stop at just one? L.A.’s Firehouse Hotel is full of inspiring color combinations, including in this bathroom, where mustard yellow tile and tomato red cabinets are an unlikely power couple.
Put Your Tub in Your Shower
Try to name a feature more luxurious than a standing shower that also contains a bathtub. The Ace Hotel New Orleans makes a compelling case for this doubled-up bathing situation, which boasts glossy gray tile and a charcoal ceiling to keeps things cohesive.
Mix and Match
The über-cool Hotel Des Grands Boulevards in Paris made waves for its bold design—and the bathrooms are no exception. Why limit yourself to one tile pattern or color when you can have three? In this space, hexagon wall tiles ground the pale blue paint and pink checkered floor tile, making for one sophisticated room.