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When Michael and Lisa Fine, the duo behind bathroom accessories brand Quiet Town, recently moved into their dream house in Northern California, major renovations weren’t in the budget right away. If they wanted to make any changes, they’d have to go the DIY route—and that’s exactly what they did in their kids Indie and Sunny’s brown-on-black bathroom.
“As you can imagine, a bad bathroom is a deep personal and professional cut,” Fine says. “ I couldn’t even pee in our kid’s bathroom without imagining taking a sledgehammer to the kids’ sink.”
Removing the dated tiles and adjusting the tub or shower location was out of the question, but Fine could see the potential in the ’80s-coded sink that they inherited. She decided to use the bathroom’s neutral palette as a frame for colors that popped on the washstand. First up: the metal flowers on the front had to go first. Armed with a Dremel tool, pickleball goggles, and yellow kitchen gloves, she and son Indie filed them off clean.
Then, her daughter Sunny and a friend picked out paint colors for the project. By using Benjamin Moore’s Sheer Romance on the sink frame and O’Reilly Green on the drain pipe, they turned a drab fixture into a sherbert-hued centerpiece. “I was careful not to paint over the hardware that might need to be removed if there was a problem,” she adds. Then, they slicked the window frame in the same green to connect the dots.
To finish off the refresh, Fine removed the wall sconce in favor of an Allied Maker pendant over the mirror, laid down a few of Quiet Town’s Lost Coast rugs to riff off the faux stone tiles with decorative waves, and then added hooks everywhere to hang their colorful towels like functional art, she says. She swapped in a lighter color of the Spot shower organizer, too. The renewed space is the definition of “work with what you have.”
“There’s definitely beauty that you can pull out of your existing bathroom,” Fine proclaims. “If you inherited a color, no matter what it is, dig in!” In her case, with earthy hues underfoot and a window looking out onto trees, why not make it feel practically outside?