A small Turkish bathroom. A decade of tenant living. A studs-out gut renovation. And one piece of custom-ordered terrazzo that turned the whole room into something that wouldn’t look out of place in a boutique hotel on the Aegean coast. Original transformation shared by Reddit user ahmethasimgibi.
A homeowner in Turkey moved into a house that had been rented out for ten years. The bathroom showed every one of those years. Beige square wall tile with a wood-trim accent stripe running horizontally through the middle. A pedestal sink. A janky shower corner with a brown floor and a hand-held wand. A wall-mounted electric water heater. The kind of bathroom that doesn’t look broken, it just looks like a rental.
So he gutted it. Down to the brick. Sloped ceiling exposed. Plumbing rerouted. Walls rebuilt.
What he put back in is what’s getting hundreds of comments on the Reddit thread. A wall-mounted floating toilet. A floating wood vanity with a vessel sink. Pale sage-green vertical kit-kat tile running halfway up the walls. A pebble-shaped mirror flanked by sconces. A walk-in shower with no curb and a single sheet of glass.
And then the floor.
The Floor Is the Whole Room
Strip the floor out of the after photos and the renovation is genuinely beautiful but quiet. Restrained sage walls. Warm wood vanity. Soft sconce lighting. The kind of small bathroom that reads as nicely-done but forgettable.
Put the floor back in and the entire room changes character. Large-format terrazzo tiles, the kind with chunky multi-colored aggregate pieces in pink, deep green, charcoal, and creamy off-white, pour across the floor of both the main bathroom and the walk-in shower. The pattern is bold enough to be polarizing. Top-voted comments include both “These are my dream bathroom floors” and “floor looks terrible to me.” That split is the tell. A floor people are fighting about is a floor that’s doing real design work.
The owner confirmed in the thread that the tile is Vitra Resincrete Paliano Fango in a 120×120 cm format, custom-ordered. “To be honest it was quite tricky to get them,” he wrote, “so I hope the process works out more smoothly for you.”
The whole bathroom is built around that one material decision. Everything else is restrained on purpose.
A 10-Year Rental Bathroom Is a Specific Kind of Starting Point
The before photos are not stylized “bad.” They are bad in the way actual rental bathrooms are bad.
A pedestal sink with a green mop bucket parked next to it. A wall-mounted electric heater that takes up real estate. A horizontal wood-trim accent stripe that pins the whole room to a vague late-90s era. The shower corner has a brown floor, a hand-held wand, and visible water staining on the silicone seam. A photo of someone’s poster is taped to the wall.
The homeowner notes in the post description that “a tenant lived here for 10 years before I moved in and so I started all new from scratch.” That’s the entire premise. A decade of someone else’s daily wear, none of it catastrophic, all of it adding up.
The Gut Was Total
The middle photos in the post show what most renovation accounts don’t bother documenting. The walls stripped back to brick. Rubble piled on the floor. The sloped wood ceiling visible above the demo. A single window punched into the masonry. Tile adhesive hatching still scored across the back wall.
This is the part that makes the after photos credible. The renovation isn’t a cosmetic refresh. It’s a structural reset. New plumbing rough-in. New wall framing. New tile substrate. A wall-mounted toilet, which requires the supply line and carrier frame to be set into the wall before any finish work begins. None of that is a weekend project.
The Wall Tile Is Doing Quiet Work
The walls are where most small-bathroom renovations go wrong. Either the tile is loud enough to compete with everything else in the room, or it’s so safe it disappears.
Here, the pale sage-green vertical kit-kat tile splits the difference. It runs from the floor to roughly the height of the door frame, then stops. Above that line, the walls go back to plain off-white plaster. That split is what keeps the room from feeling closed-in. A small bathroom tiled floor-to-ceiling reads as a tile box. Stopping the tile partway up gives the eye a place to rest and lets the sloped ceiling breathe.
The vertical orientation of the tile matters too. Vertical tile draws the eye upward, which makes a low-ceilinged or sloped-ceiling bathroom feel taller than it is. It’s the same trick that floor-to-ceiling cabinets pull in a small kitchen, reapplied to a smaller room.
The Floating Fixtures Are the Other Quiet Move
The toilet and vanity are both wall-mounted. They don’t touch the floor.
That’s not a style decision. That’s a square-footage decision. In a small bathroom, fixtures that float read as half their actual size because the floor underneath them stays visible. The floor extends unbroken from the door to the shower, which makes the room feel bigger than it measures. A floor-mounted toilet would have cut that visual line in half.
Several commenters specifically called out the wall-hung toilet as something they want for their own renovations. Commenter EliasWestCoast wrote: “Popular in Europe, very less so in the States but I included a hanging toilet in my new build, a whole, different aesthetic.”
The bigger benefit isn’t the aesthetic. It’s the floor coverage. The bold terrazzo only works as a hero element because there’s so much of it visible. Float the fixtures, and the floor has room to perform.
The One Regret
In the post description, the owner mentions exactly one thing he’d change. “Only regret is no skylight,” he wrote. “Two other rooms in the house have them and the difference in mood is significant.”
That’s an honest detail most renovation posts don’t include. The bathroom has a small window, visible in both the before and after photos, but no overhead daylight. In a sloped-ceiling room, a skylight would have changed how the terrazzo reads under different times of day. The chunky aggregate pieces shift color depending on the light source, which is why the same floor reads warmer in some photos and cooler in others.
One commenter offered a workaround: “If you really miss the skylight vibe, some people fake it with a big frosted panel and daylight LEDs above it and it actually tricks your brain a bit.”
The takeaway for anyone planning a similar renovation: if there’s any structural feasibility for a skylight in a sloped-ceiling bathroom, put it on the must-have list. It’s the one thing the owner can’t add later without re-cutting the roof.
The Verdict
The thread is one of the more polarized bathroom remodel posts on the subreddit. Most commenters love it. Several name-checked the floor as the reason. A handful actively dislike it. Commenter Laszlo4711 summed up the majority position with characteristic Reddit bluntness: “Huge improvement. We need to make beige bathrooms illegal.”
The dissenters had specific complaints, mostly about the floor being too busy. That disagreement is what makes this remodel worth writing about. Forgettable design gets polite likes. Memorable design gets fights in the comments.
What This Bathroom Quietly Proves
Anyone planning a small bathroom renovation runs into the same fork in the road. Stay safe, neutral tile, conventional layout, fixtures that disappear, and end up with a room that’s pleasant but interchangeable with thousands of others. Or pick one bold element and build the entire design around it.
This renovation took the second path. The terrazzo is the loud element. Everything else is quiet on purpose. Sage walls. Wood vanity. Pebble mirror. Soft sconces. White ceiling. The floor doesn’t have to fight any of them for attention.
Ten years of tenant wear got reset to brick. The new bathroom isn’t large, isn’t ornate, and isn’t expensive in the way a high-end American remodel is expensive. But the floor is doing the work of three design decisions, and the rest of the room had the discipline to step back and let it.
All credits go to Reddit user ahmethasimgibi. Images and original post by ahmethasimgibi on r/BathroomRemodeling. Tile sourcing details confirmed by the original poster: Vitra Resincrete Paliano Fango.
