Project 03 — Bathrooms
A tired Ottawa primary bathroom rebuilt as a calm marble-and-brass suite — a frameless glass shower, a navy double vanity, and a full cedar sauna built into the footprint next door.
Location
Ottawa, Ontario
Category
Primary bathroom renovation
Scope
Full gut, tiling, glass shower, vanity, cedar sauna
Year
2025
Duration
Approximately 7 weeks
The brief
The existing bathroom was a dated three-piece with a builder tub, a single sink and no storage worth the name. Beside it sat an oversized closet that the family had never really used — dead square footage on the best side of the house.
A bright, light, hard-wearing bathroom with a proper walk-in shower and two sinks, and — the reason they called us — a real cedar sauna they could use on a February evening without leaving the house.
The idea
The build
Bathrooms and saunas are unforgiving: waterproofing, ventilation and heat all have to be right before anything pretty goes on the wall. The same project manager ran every stage, start to finish.
The room was taken back to studs and the unused closet next door opened up. Plumbing was re-run for a two-sink vanity, the shower drain relocated, and a dedicated 240V circuit pulled for the sauna heater with its control mounted outside the hot room.
Large-format marble-look porcelain runs floor to ceiling in the shower, with hexagon mosaic underfoot for grip and a single recessed niche set at shoulder height. A frameless glass enclosure with brass hardware keeps the sightline open all the way to the window.
A navy shaker double vanity with a quartz top and undermount basins, backed by a full panel of pearl hexagon mosaic. Two arched brass mirrors, brass sconces and brushed brass faucets, hooks and towel bars carry one metal through the whole room.
The old closet became an insulated, foil-vapour-barriered hot room clad in clear western red cedar — vertical boards on the walls, a two-tier bench, a backrest, and warm strip lighting tucked under the lower bench. Cedar handles heat without splintering and stays cool to the touch.
A bronze-glass cedar-framed door lets light and warmth read from the bathroom, with the heater, digital control and temperature readout set outside the hot room. Trim, paint and hardware were finished last so nothing got marked during the build.
Details
Outcome
The family gained a second sink, a shower they can actually stand in, storage where there was none, and a sauna that takes about fifteen minutes to come up to temperature — all inside the original footprint, with no addition and no lost bedroom.
See more of our work“The best square footage in most houses is the space nobody uses. Find it, and you rarely need to build out.”
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