Elegant Bathroom Storage for Indian Home Buyers
As an Upper-Middle-Class home buyer, you always want to design, declutter and enhance your bathroom spaces and make the very best of every square inch available. Storage is an important aspect that can’t be taken lightly!
Be it an apartment in a high-rise building or an apartment or builder floor, the sizes of bathrooms are usually between 50 and 100 square feet. The spaces are usually less, considering that you need space for a water closet, a shower section and a wash basin in your bathroom. So, how do you use the space available to balance functionality and aesthetics perfectly?
Here are some bathroom storage ideas you can consider while designing and planning your bathroom. The needs differ depending on whether you have less space or more in your bathrooms. Normally, you have at least 3 bathrooms in an upper-middle-class home. Some homes even have a powder room next to the dining or drawing/living room.
So, not all bathrooms can have the same design look. Depending on the type of bathroom, and its utility, the choices can be different. Storage is an important element of that!
The bathroom helps you store many items, like toiletries and bottles of shampoos/conditioners by different companies for varied purposes. With so many assorted items to store, smart bathroom storage tips help you get the most out of the available space in your apartment or a ‘builder floor’ in India.
These ideas and tips work for tiny and big bathroom areas with a large vanity for maximum storage, and help you make the most of every square inch.
After all, you will need everything in your bathroom to look tidy and well-organised so that every family member’s functional needs are met.
Men’s needs are different from women’s. A lot depends on many things such as the needs, preferences, age etc. of your loved ones living in your apartment.
Likewise, the earning younger couple in an Indian household with children in school/college would have different needs compared to their parents staying with them. The set of toiletries and grooming kits, needed for women and men of various age groups vary, and so do their storage needs.
Children have different needs, and at times parents are required to watch over their children, the height and placement need to be such that children can reach some types of items. Plus, there could be items you would want to be out of reach of smaller children for safety purposes.
If the bathroom is exclusively for adults, the needs differ, whereas women and children have different storage needs. All of them must be able to reach out to the items of need in the bathroom without a struggle.
The storage must also be conveniently placed based on the height and age of the bathroom users. They must be easy to put back after use, and not difficult to open/close or pick from.
Whether it is placement of your towels or organizing your toiletries, the bathroom needs to do everything efficiently.
The key is to know who will use the bathroom, and explore their preferences, likes/dislikes, abilities, convenience, and overall functionality and aesthetics to make bathroom use and manage the storage conveniently and efficiently.
Depending on the above criteria, you can pick on the ideas below that are only suggestive. Besides this, the tips and ideas allow you to open up your horizons and the expectations you have from yourself and your interior designer while designing your bathrooms.
Plus, if you are buying a standalone building apartment or builder-floor, the builder may even accommodate your requests to change and incorporate design elements that you have picked from various sources.
1. Single-Vanity Bathroom Storage Ideas
A single vanity right under a large wash basin works well as a storage and table for your wash basin. You could have several drawers on the upper part of the single large vanity, and open storage racks on the lower part. Here you could keep items like towels, toilet paper etc which are good for ventilation too.
2. Large Drawers Make It Easy to Pull Out
You could also opt for large pull-out drawers with inbuilt dividers. Being below your bathroom wash basins, you could tie them up with the plumbing needs for the wash basin to fit and for water pipes to occupy some space. Clearly, you can store just about everything from your cosmetics to big-sized bottles viz. shampoos, conditioners, perfumes, and cosmetics.
Being big, you can also add smaller partition drawers (both paper and plastic) to make them more decluttered, and easy to access.
3. Cabinets on the Wall: Use Vertical Spaces
If you don’t have enough space on the wall where your mirror is hung above the wash basin, you can hang a cabinet on the adjoining to keep bottles, tubes, jars and other toiletries of different sizes. Such tall shelves give you great relief when space is a constraint, and give you a sense of spaciousness. Plus, accessing these items becomes easier. The cabinets’ handles should be placed so that users of different heights can easily access, open and shut the cabinet doors.
4. Standalone Storage Drawers
If you don’t have vanity storage, you could use an old dressing table or chest drawers, provided it fits in the area of your bathroom. Of course, this is over and above your wash basin. You could even decorate it with a tray, full of curios like an elegant small lamp, assorted candles or plants.
5. Long Bathroom Shelves: Recessed Structure
You could use the niches on the wall to store items, including niches behind the doors. This would allow you to organise many of your bathroom toiletries, towels, and clothes. You could create multiple shelves in these narrow spaces/niches to store many items conveniently. You could even label these shelves to give them a more structured look and feel. This works well for children’s and guest bathrooms.
6. Antique Furniture Repurposed as Bathroom Storage
You could go more innovative if you want to just place a dressing table instead of going with vanity spaces. It might just work well for you given your bathroom space. The whole idea is not to be afraid to experiment and to try on new things provided you have the space for it.
Your everyday toiletries could be stored in narrow tables. You could use folding furniture items which can add that special antique look to your bathroom spaces. Anything enclosed is good to hide the clutter that makes your bathroom look small. Front folding tables with storage bins are ideal for such an innovative use. Plus, when you close the shutters of folding cabin table, it allows for space creation for you to walk more freely.
7. Mix Of Drawers And Open Easy-Access Storage
To give a semblance of balance, your vanity or storage areas could comprise of a mix of drawers and open spaces to keep your makeup and toiletries.
Open spaces are best to place towels in plain sight and are much easier to pull when you are wet in the bathroom.
You could also use glass jars to keep makeup items like cotton balls, brushes and a range of makeup items near the mirror.
8. Hanging Shelves on Bathroom Walls
Floating shelves are the best way to use vertical spaces to create bathroom storage and release the floor spaces. When the bathroom measures less than 50 square feet, then floating shelves do the trick. The display looks good and you can have a range of glass containers or even baskets to store items that look attractive and well-organized. In these storage bins, the display of toiletries and daily necessities looks good and stylish.
9. Rolling Cart Storage
Rolling carts are extremely handy allowing you to keep items in the bathroom and also make it convenient for you to carry the trolley from one bathroom to another.
A 3-tier cart on wheels is a good item to drag and pull in and out of the bathroom and is particularly easy for baby items like diapers, and other children’s nursing items.
It’s a versatile and inexpensive bathroom storage idea where you can roll up the towels, and store a range of items like oils, creams and other daily use items.
10. Vertical Storage Ladder
A small ladder on the sidewall of the wash basin is a good idea for parking your hand or long towels and keeping other clothes that you wish to wear or discard after a refreshing shower. Depending on the functionality and aesthetics you are looking for, you could also hang small containers on the ladder rung to store items as well as other curious things. Ladders are also good for storage and can be very useful in saving space.
These are some ideas to get you thinking about the various ways you can store things. The ideas are only suggestive, and the intent is to get you actively involved in the storage aspect of your bathrooms!
