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!”

Before, during and after photos