Category: HOME AND KITCHEN

Every other room in the house has been rethought by now — except the bathroom, which is still, in most homes, a beige box with a mirror and some towels. Nobody’s fault, exactly. It’s the room people renovate last and think about least. Upstate didn’t get that memo, and the bathrooms up here are better for it. Shop At Etsy DoorsbyMJ

Start with the door, because it’s the first thing wrong with almost every bathroom in America: a hollow-core slab that could belong to any room in the house, no personality, no reason to notice it. The fix is a carved antique closet door — salvaged from an old estate or a torn-down farmhouse, detail worked into the wood that no builder-grade supplier bothers with anymore — hung on the bathroom itself. It doesn’t try to blend in. A door like that is meant to be looked at, not walked past.

The linen storage is where people usually default to a flat-pack cabinet from a big-box store, and it’s a mistake every time. A vintage armoire — the kind that spent a century holding someone’s clothes or bedding — does the job better, shelved out inside for towels and toiletries, hardware left dented and dark because polishing it off would erase the entire point.

The vanity is where the whole room comes together, and here it’s not a vanity at all — it’s an eclectic vintage sideboard,  fitted with a vessel sink and cut through for plumbing. Nothing about it matches the armoire on purpose, and it shouldn’t. A stock vanity looks like every other bathroom on the block; a sideboard with a hundred years on it looks like it wandered in from somewhere better.

The tub is where people usually cave and go modern, all acrylic and straight lines, and it’s a mistake too. A clawfoot tub — reclaimed, re-enameled, feet regripped — does more for a bathroom than any tile choice ever will. Put it under a window if the plumbing allows it. None of this is expensive by accident. It’s expensive because it’s real — actual old furniture and actual reclaimed doors instead of anything that shipped flat-packed. But it’s also the only version of a bathroom renovation that doesn’t look identical to every other one on the block. A carved door, an old armoire, and a sideboard doing a sink’s job look like they’ve always been there, which, up here, they usually have.

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