Bath Accessories

Fixing positions and blocking

A towel bar, a robe hook and a shelf all have to be fixed to something solid. In a tiled bathroom that means the fixing goes through tile into whatever is behind it, and what is behind it was decided when the wall was built.

That is why the positions belong in the bathroom drawing rather than in the final week. Where a rail will go, how long it is and what it fixes into are questions for whoever is building the room, and they are much easier to answer before the tiling than after.

Towel bar lengths

Beyond towel rails the range carries rings, hooks, shelves, paper holders, grab rails and mirrors, and the rails themselves run from around ten inches up to thirty six. A hand towel needs very little; a bath sheet needs enough rail to hang open rather than doubled over on itself, which is what the longer bars are for.

That is the practical difference between a bathroom where towels dry and one where they do not, and it is decided by the length of rail the wall can give rather than by the towel. Where the wall is short, two shorter rails at different heights often work better than one long one.

Bars, rings and hooks

A bar spreads a towel out, which is what dries it. A ring holds a hand towel neatly beside a basin and takes very little wall. A hook takes anything, dries the least well, and needs no thought to use, which is why it suits the places where a towel is put down, not hung up properly.

Most bathrooms want more than one kind. A bar for bath towels, a ring at the basin and hooks on the back of a door cover the three different things people actually hang up.

Bathroom shelves

The shelves in this range give somewhere to put what a basin cannot hold, which in a small bathroom is most of it. A shelf above or beside the basin takes the bottles off the surface and makes the basin easier to clean around.

It also puts them on show, which is either the point or the problem depending on the bathroom. Where it is the problem, a shelf inside a shower niche or a cabinet is the better answer, and the shower niches and benches page covers the built in version.

Matching the finish

Accessories are usually bought after the faucet, often from a different maker, and often months later. That sequence is exactly the one that produces a near match, not a match, which the shower systems page explains.

The straightforward answer is to choose accessories from the same range as the faucet, or to choose a deliberate contrast.

Buying accessories as a set

Much of this range comes from one maker in matching families, which removes the finish problem entirely and means the bar, the ring, the hook and the shelf share the same bracket detail as well as the same color.

A set also settles the small questions nobody wants to make separately: how far a bar stands off the wall, how a bracket meets the tile, what shape the ends are. Those are invisible individually and obvious when four pieces disagree.