When Claire Cheong-Leen and Ian Eccles bought their 1950s house in Oxford in 2012 the bathroom was low on their list of priorities, despite being a cramped and barely functioning room. ‘It was probably the worst bathroom I’d ever seen,’ Claire recalls. ‘We had plans for a huge extension at the back of the house that included a shower room downstairs so we decided that the upstairs bathroom would have to wait.’
It was only when the extension project was coming to an end, almost two years later, that the couple realised it would be more cost effective and less disruptive to tackle the bathroom while they still had all the tradesmen on site. ‘Our plumber, Christopher Smith, explained that the position of the new drains for the extension would directly affect what we could achieve upstairs,’ Claire explains. ‘If we’d known this at the start of the project we would have made decisions about the bathroom sooner and saved money – hindsight is a wonderful thing!’
By building a plinth on which the bath sits, Claire and Ian’s builder was able to hide pipework and has created a stage for the bath, which adds drama and makes an impressive feature