TILE & MARBLE
We used a lot of tile in this bathroom because we wanted all the floor and wall surfaces to be watertight.
One of the things we love to do is visit historic houses when we travel. We were inspired to tile seven feet up the walls all around the room after visiting Ernest Hemingway¹s house in Key West, Florida. His bathrooms are all tiled floor to ceiling, as are the bathrooms in many other historic homes.
The modern motivation of choosing cost over durability has led to using less and less tile in bathrooms, and less protection from moisture. Of course, it ends up costing more in the long run because bathrooms then need to be replaced more frequently.
We opted to build a "durable" bathroom instead of a "disposable" one, and that required more tile.
Though we could have purchased tile with recycled content, the cost was way beyond what we could afford. Instead, we purchased cheap white subway tile and tiled the walls up seven feet all the way around the room and into the shower area. We splurged on some decorative accent tiles. All nontoxic, none recycled.
We used marble for the baseboards. While this may seem extravagant, it actually wasn't. Here in Florida, home improvement stores sell inexpensive marble strips for windowsills because the humidity rots wooden sills very quickly. We just used those strips for the baseboards. They look beautiful and are water-tight.
Larry used leftover pieces of marble to make little shelves in the corners of our shower to hold our shampoo and soap‹very elegant recycling.
