House Walkthrough 5 - The Bathroom

Instagram and Pinterest are filled with posts of amazing bathrooms, dressed in marble with free standing bath tubs and heated towel rails. These are very nice indeed but they are invariably Western style with the sink, bath and separate shower all found in one room.

The Japanese bathroom is different with the sink situated in an undressing area that you enter before taking your bath in a separate wash room. The wash room is like a wet room with a standing shower area and a very small tub. In all but the smallest versions, the toilet is situated in a separate place entirely, the separation of “dirty” and “clean” spaces being very important to Japanese people. I was happy with a toilet in the bathroom area but apparently this is little short of heresy so it’s going to be across the corridor.

Our bathroom with separate clothes removal area (top) and wet room (bottom)

Honestly, I think I prefer the Western setup. Japanese baths are too small for a 192cm man and I still don’t understand why you get clean in the shower before having a bath. Perhaps it’s memories of playing rugby and then coming home to soak off all the dirt in the bath afterwards. Then again, it’s not unheard of for British people to have carpet in their bathrooms so perhaps it’s me who is the oddity.

Nevertheless, this is Japan and, thus, we are having a Japanese-style bathroom. One compromise that I was able to secure from my loving wife is that we are doing away with the hideous all-in-one plastic vanity unit that houses the sink. The builder is going to make us some simple cabinets instead. Much better.

The sink and clothes removal area. Note the absence of vanity unit!

We actually went to look at one of the biggest Japanese kitchen suppliers, Lixil, and were pleasantly surprised with how good some of their latest things are. I lived in an apartment with older Lixil stuff when I first came to Japan and the quality was pretty ropey. One of their setups had a Jacuzzi bath and large widescreen TV as well as various other cool things (mood lighting!). It was seriously impressive, but at $36,000, so it should be.

At this stage, we are opting for a small, very simple bathroom with no enhancements. I think it’s going to run to about $3000 which is barely more than the aforementioned “unit baths” found in very small apartments which have all things in one space (even the toilet!) I believe we’ll have the option to choose colours and some fittings later on so we may be able to make it look a little nicer or more interesting.

Overall though, it’s not a room that we want to invest an awful lot of money in and we have to make some savings somewhere. On the list of priorities, it just wasn’t that high up for us so, as long as the shower sprays water and it’s easy to clean, I think we’re ok (not that I wouldn’t have liked a Jacuzzi and flatscreen TV).

House Walkthrough 4 - The Study

The study on the ground floor is also connected to the wood deck, ideal for working whilst supervising children playing outside. Again this should allow for easy ventilation in the hot summer months and reduce reliance on air conditioners. The original plans featured a door and window although we recently opted to replace these with a French door. Aside from being slightly cheaper, this will allow for more air-flow and more light although we will probably need to put a curtain across it to regulate any glare hitting the computers.

By the French doors will be a small sofa and coffee table and a large desk will run along the northern wall. The fitted desk offered by the building company have been removed from the plans to bring the cost down, although we may end up reinstating this at a later stage if we can’t find anything we like in the stores. The desk will need to accommodate two desktop computers and we will also need a place to store paperwork and files, both of which are beginning to overwhelm our small apartment. Around the remaining walls of the study, we intend to use IKEA’s famous BILLY bookcases. These are highly customizable, practical, sturdy and, most importantly, extremely cheap.

The study. French doors on the LHS. Access from the corridor (RHS) and Walk-In-Closet (the space below WD8)

House Walkthrough 3 - Master Bedroom

The master bedroom sits next to the kids bedrooms on the West edge of the house. It too is not an especially large space, measuring around 3.6mx3.6m. This should provide just enough space for a double bed, a couple of bed-side tables, a corner chair and some sort of make-up station (I have no idea what this is called). The bedroom will have access to the outside wood deck via sliding French doors. It’s nice to be able to easily ventilate the space and perhaps to have a place outside to sit if one of us wakes up early.

Connected to the Master bedroom is a spacious Walk-In-Closet. We have one of these where we live now but, because our place is quite small, it ceased being simply a closet very early on. Currently it houses almost everything we have, from rice to soap to skis and golf clubs. It is also pretty badly designed with baskets all below knee height, organized two-deep. This means that the stuff at the back barely ever gets looked at, let alone used.

The master bedroom (LHS) and Walk-In-Closet (RHS). The connecting room at the top is the study.

Two (rather boring) aspects of the Walk-In-Closet

Despite the current quirky setup, we do like the concept of having a Walk-In-Closet as it allows the bedroom itself to be relatively free of furniture. Having a space designated as just for clothes means that you don’t have to constantly look at them so we’ve made this space large enough to hopefully preclude ever having to store clothes elsewhere (with the exception of shoes and coats in the genkan).

Originally, our builders were going to furnish this for us but we have actually opted to leave the space empty. One of the reasons for this is to save cost but the other is that we really like the IKEA options that we saw. We had to play around a bit with the dimensions of this room and the position of the doorways in order to accommodate the IKEA PAX range, which is what we are expecting to use.

A word on doorways – we have moved the doors several times and have opted for just an opening from the Master Bedroom to the closet. We felt that opting for no door would make both the closet and the bedroom seem more spacious and that we could always add a curtain at some stage if we needed some separation.

We also decided to include another door in the closet leading to the study. The reason for this was to give us the flexibility to swap the study and the bedroom around at some stage if our needs change. In a way, it also gives us more of a feeling of “our” space since the three areas will be connected. Since it will double as a corridor of sorts, it’s going to be important to keep the closet very tidy. Challenge accepted.