Titirangi, West Auckland

A small downstairs bathroom reworked in black and white, with patterned floor tiles and a floating timber vanity

Completed October 2020

Quick answer: This contemporary bathroom renovation in Titirangi turned a damp, dated downstairs bathroom into a sharp black-and-white space — patterned floor tiles, white subway walls, a glass tiled shower, and a floating timber vanity that warms the whole room.

Why This Titirangi Bathroom Needed Doing

Older Titirangi homes and damp bathrooms go hand in hand. The suburb sits in the bush on the southern edge of the Waitākere Ranges, and a lot of its housing stock predates any real thought about ventilation. Tuck a bathroom downstairs in a home like that, leave it without a working extractor fan, and mould is only a matter of time.

That was the starting point here. Tracey’s downstairs bathroom was tired and going backwards. “The bathroom was old, the shower door had started to rot and the extractor fan didn’t exist,” she told us. She’d already renovated the upstairs bathroom a few years earlier and knew what she wanted this one to feel like.

“I didn’t want just a generic plain bathroom but wanted it to be similar to my upstairs bathroom.” So the brief was clear from the start — pull the two spaces into the same design language, and make a small room feel bigger than it is.

Sound familiar? It’s the most common downstairs-bathroom story we see in West Auckland: a space that was fine twenty years ago, quietly failing in a damp climate, and an owner who already knows the look they’re after.

The Design — Black, White, and a Bit of Warmth

The whole scheme runs on contrast. Patterned floor tiles do the talking; everything else stays quiet so they can. White subway tiles on two of the four walls, a white-painted wall behind the vanity, black grout and black fixtures pulling it all together.

Then the timber. A floating vanity in Southern Oak breaks up the black-and-white with a bit of warmth — the one natural element in the room, and the thing your eye lands on first. It’s a small move that stops a monochrome bathroom feeling cold.

Keeping the floor pattern off the walls was deliberate. In a room this size, pattern everywhere closes it in. Pattern on the floor, calm on the walls — the space reads larger than its actual footprint.

Flooring and Wall Tiles

The tiles carry this bathroom. Because Tracey didn’t want a plain white box, the job was to layer in detail that worked together in a tight space without crowding it.

The patterned floor tiles give the room its drama; the matte subway tiles give it texture. The subway runs across two walls, adding a subtle 3D edge that draws the eye to the corner. Behind the vanity, the wall was kept plain white so the timber stays the hero.

Floor Tiles

• Artisan Deco Uno 200 x 200 glazed ceramic, friction-tested SRV 26, from The Tile Depot

Wall Tiles

• City White Matt 100 x 300 glazed ceramic from The Tile Depot, set with black grout to tie back to the floor
• Light and dark grey hexagonal tiles in the shower niche

The black grout against white subway is the kind of detail that sounds minor and isn’t. It’s what threads the white walls back into the black-and-white floor instead of leaving them as two separate ideas.

The Floating Vanity

A floating vanity instead of a standing one keeps the floor visible underneath, which makes a small bathroom feel less boxed in. The timber front does double duty — it lifts the warmth and it’s the first thing you see walking in.

A thin black titanium strip frames the timber, picking up the black tapware and the black in the floor tiles so nothing sits on its own. The storage cabinet was done to match.

Vanity and storage

• St Michel vanity with a Southern Oak Wilderness door and soft black matte titanium strip
• 900mm St Michel Dante mirror cabinet
• St Michel 2409 SM Sussy basin
• Black matte Methven tapware
• St Michel City tower 1740 storage cabinet, two doors, Southern Oak Wilderness front with a black velvet titanium strip

The Tiled Shower

Running the same floor and wall tiles straight into the shower is what makes this bathroom feel bigger than it is. No change of material at the shower line means the eye reads one continuous space, not a room with a box bolted into the corner.

Custom glass keeps it open. The waterproofing under it is the part nobody sees and the part that matters most in a damp Titirangi home.

Shower details

• Floor and wall tiles continued into the shower
• Raised shower tray, walls and floor fully waterproofed
• Custom-built glass
• Matte black shower fittings from Reece
• Mizu Soothe shower mixer in matte black
• Tiled shower niche for storage

Toilet and Finishing

The finishing details hold the scheme together — black where the rest of the room is black, warm where it needs softening.

Fittings

• Evora back-to-wall suite with a low-profile seat from Renoarts
• Black matte toilet roll holder from Reece
• Heated towel rail

Why Small Patterned Tiles Take More Work

This looks like a simple bathroom. It wasn’t a simple tile job.

Small patterned floor tiles are far more demanding to lay than large-format tiles. More tiles means more grout lines, and a repeating pattern has to line up perfectly across the whole floor or the eye catches every misalignment. There’s nowhere to hide a lazy cut.

That’s why this one went to our senior tiler rather than a generalist. Getting a patterned floor to read as one clean, cohesive surface takes a level of skill that the finished room makes look effortless — which is exactly the point.

💡 Quick tip: If you’re set on patterned or small-format floor tiles, factor in the extra labour. The tiles themselves might be affordable — the skilled setting-out and laying is where a patterned floor earns its finish.

The Waterproofing Behind a Bathroom That Lasts

In a downstairs bathroom in a damp Titirangi home, the tiling everyone sees is only half the job. The half that keeps the room sound sits underneath it. Before a single tile went down, the shower tray, walls and floor were tanked with a waterproof membrane so water has no path into the timber framing below.

That work isn’t just good practice, it’s a Building Code requirement. New Zealand Building Code clause E3 Internal Moisture requires wet-area surfaces to be impervious and easily cleaned, and the Acceptable Solution E3/AS1 sets out how a compliant shower is built. The membrane systems used behind the tile and across the floor are specified to AS/NZS 4858, the performance standard for wet-area tanking.

Get this layer right and a tiled shower runs for decades. Get it wrong and the first sign is usually the damage, not the leak. It’s the reason a bathroom is worth doing properly rather than tiling over a marginal substrate, and where consent or Restricted Building Work applies, that’s one to confirm with your Licensed Building Practitioner or Auckland Council.

What a Bathroom Renovation Like This Costs in Auckland

Every bathroom is priced to its own scope — the size of the room, the tiles you choose, the complexity of the tiling, and how much waterproofing and ventilation work is involved all move the number. A patterned small-format floor like this one carries more in skilled labour than a large-tile floor of the same area, even when the tiles cost about the same.

Rather than quote a figure that won’t match your home, use our bathroom renovation cost calculator to get a realistic Auckland estimate for your own project. For the full scope of what we handle, see how our team runs a bathroom renovation from design through to the final seal. On this side of the city, we also cover the bathroom work we take on across West Auckland. If you want the design worked through first, that starts in our Design Studio.

What Tracey Got

“I didn’t want just a generic plain bathroom but wanted it to be similar to my upstairs bathroom.”
— Tracey, Titirangi

A Bathroom That Matches the House

The downstairs bathroom now talks to the one upstairs — same design language, same level of finish, and finally a room that handles a damp West Auckland climate instead of fighting it. A small footprint, used properly, with the detail doing the heavy lifting.

If you’ve got a tired bathroom in Titirangi or anywhere across Auckland, here’s where to start.

➡ Book your free in-home consultation with Superior Renovations
➡ Estimate your bathroom renovation with our cost calculator
➡ Request a free feasibility report for your project

Titirangi Bathroom Renovation — Common Questions

Further Resources

1. More completed Auckland renovation projects
2. Real client stories from across Auckland