Bold and Beautiful Bathrooms

Dark Colors Create Drama in a Small Bath

Designer Jamie Drake creates a sexy black bathroom for a New York townhouse.

In this powder room, adjacent to the large dining room in a New York City townhouse, designer Jamie Drake (www.drakedesignassociates.com) covered half the walls in graphite gray Venetian plaster, which he had polished to a very high sheen; the other half are lined in gold-backed white glass mosaic tile. Drake fashioned a sink from a 19th-century Turkish marble basin, and set it into a custom-designed base of ebonized wood with polished nickel straps and a marble top. The overall effect? As dramatic as midnight. And while shiny black walls might overwhelm a larger room, they are perfect in this 48-square-foot space.

But even in small doses, the challenge with black is to keep it from looking funereal, says Drake, author of Jamie Drake's New American Glamour (Bulfinch, 2006) and designer of bathroom accessories for Labrazel, Inc. (www.labrazel.com) and THG (www.thgusa.com). To keep the mood sexy, rather than somber, he opted to paint the ceiling a sharp coral color, with a pale oyster gray crown molding.

"In addition to lightening the room, the vivid ceiling color also lifts the eye," Drake explains, "and that's always a plus in a smaller space."

Photograph by William Waldron.