Renovating Several Bathrooms at Once: How It Changes the Project

A villa with three or four bathrooms of the same age tends to have them renovated one at a time by whoever was available that year, and the result is four rooms that share a roof and nothing else. Doing them together is a different project, and this is how it differs – the long version of the multiple-bathrooms page.

One design

Not four identical rooms: one family of materials, one approach to the wet area, one metal finish, with the master suite at a higher level and the guest bathrooms simpler. A stone floor in the master suite and a warm porcelain from the same palette in the guest rooms read as designed; four unrelated palettes read as accumulated. Decide the family first, then the rooms.

One plumbing plan

Several bathrooms share a house’s supply and drainage, and in an older house or a finca the question of where the water can reach and where the waste can leave is answered for the building before it is answered for any room. A company that works in villas draws that plan first, and it is what decides which bedrooms can take an en-suite and which cannot.

What is shared, and what is not

The sequence

The rooms are done in an order that keeps one bathroom usable for most of the work – the guest bathrooms first while the family uses the master suite, or the reverse – and the trades move from room to room rather than waiting: the plumber first-fixes the second bathroom while the tiler finishes the first. For a second home the whole sequence fits into one empty stretch and is planned backwards from the arrival date.

The finca, and the hotel

A finca bought with one bathroom and a plan for three is the same project with the plumbing plan doing more of the work. A hotel corridor is the same project repeated twenty times to a sample room, between seasons, and has its own page.