The Station. Photo by SerenityLife
The Bathroom
Author: Travis the Trannyboi
21 years ago I arrived in New York City from Scotland to visit pb, now of Reclaimed Home fame, and was immediatedly fascinated by The Subway. I was an undergrad painting student at the time, and returned to Scotland to begin making full-size replicas of mosaic-ed station names, complete with grafitti and running-water staining. Kind of like the Boyle Family’s work, but with walls. At the time, i remember saying that if I ever bought a flat, I would tile my bathroom with a New York subway station name.
Ten years later: my sister and I buy a tenement flat in Glasgow. Built round the turn of the last century, Glasgow’s four-storey tenements of a certain size are not known for their bathrooms. Much of the population would still have been using public bathhouses, so the mod-con of the day was an inside toilet and nothing else. An otherwise well-proportioned flat with two large bedrooms and a 20′ bay-windowed living room has a bathroom the size of a cupboard with a door that opens out the way. A council refurbishment scheme had enlarged the original 4′ x 4′ room to be big enough to accommodate a shower, but it’s a tight fit. Here was my chance to do the mosaic. I decided on my local station on that first NY trip – DeKalb Avenue.
At a tile supplier who would sell tiles singly, I found close enough matches for the colours of the real station mosaic, and then had to labouriously cut the tiles up into hundreds of half-inch squares. I tiled the brick pattern first, then laid in the two rows of stripes before starting on the mosaic proper. I drew the lettering on the wall and filled in the letters first, using tile nibblers to get the exact shapes. You have to allow for quite a bit of wastage at this stage. The background was filled in after the letters had set, with the whole thing finished with black grout for that 100 year-old subway grime effect.
The walls and ceiling are painted in a kind of concrete paint effect, with the woodwork done in green”Hammerite” paint – evil fumes, but a great look suggestive of Victorian glazed brickwork. Rather than box the bath in with solid panels, there’s a frame with painted wire mesh of the kind often seen in the Subway. The photo of a Brooklyn station entrance, which covers the access to the water main was taken by pb. It’s been a great way to distract from the smallness of the room, and visitors to the flat always open the bathroom door with a “Wow!”
9 Comments
Very, very cool!
HUWAH! (That’s a gasp.) This is incredible!!! I want one!
BRILLIANT!!!
I can’t take it. This is so cool! Now if we ever leave NY we have a great decorating idea.
Genius. I want to do that to my bathroom. Damn.
I’d like to congratulate my readers for not making subway urination jokes like all of the other comments on blogs that linked to this post.
If we beg Travis to come to NY on his vacation, perhaps we can get a DIY lesson from him? I don’t think he would have time to do all of our bathrooms. Only mine. 🙂
I know the station well. You must have gone to Pratt Institute….A possible addtion would be indecipherable loudspeakers…,
Travis was just visiting us for a couple of weeks when we lived in Ft Greene…not a Pratt student.
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