A walk-in rain shower. A 600mm-deep Omnitub. A wall of glazed emerald tile. All inside a footprint most people would write off as too small for a bath at all.
When “small” stops being a problem
Open the door of this Edinburgh bathroom and your eye does something unexpected — it travels. Not down to the floor, looking for square footage. Up. Past the brushed brass flush plate, along the running bond of glazed emerald tile, into the shaft of light pouring through the original tenement window, and finally to rest on the surface of the bath beneath it.
That bath is an Omnitub. And it is the reason this room, on paper one of the more challenging compact bathroom briefs in the city, now reads like a small, perfectly-resolved boutique hotel suite.
Forazzi Bathrooms — Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer, and the team behind our last featured project — are back. And they’ve doubled down on a question we love watching designers wrestle with: what if a compact bathroom didn’t have to compromise on the bath at all?
The answer they’ve delivered here is not a small bath crammed into a small room. It’s a proper, immersive, shoulder-deep soak — paired with a walk-in shower, a fluted walnut vanity and a colour palette confident enough to belong on a magazine cover.
This is how they did it.
The brief: a narrow Edinburgh footprint, a long list of wants
Edinburgh’s tenement and Georgian conversion bathrooms are famously unforgiving. Long, narrow, often awkwardly proportioned, frequently with original windows in inconvenient places and ceiling heights that make standard fittings look stunted.
The brief here was the one we hear most often:
- A proper bath. Not a shallow shower-bath compromise.
- A separate walk-in shower. Daily-use practical, hotel-feel luxurious.
- Storage that disappears.
- A look that holds its own — no magnolia-and-chrome safety play.
- All of it inside a footprint that most off-the-shelf British baths simply will not fit into without dominating the room.
Standard 1700mm baths were never going to work. A short standard bath would have technically fit, but at 400-450mm internal depth it would have delivered the same lukewarm, half-submerged experience the client was already trying to escape.
The fix was geometric, not cosmetic. Go shorter on the floorplan. Go deeper on the bathing experience.
The hero: an Omnitub deep soaking tub, handmade in Britain
At the heart of the room sits the piece this entire scheme is built around — a deep soaking Omnitub, tucked neatly under the original window with the glazed emerald tile wrapping the alcove on three sides.
A few things to notice if your eye, like ours, goes straight to the bath:
The depth. Every Omnitub shares one defining specification: 600mm of internal depth. That is roughly 50% deeper than a standard British bath. In practical terms it means full-shoulder submersion. The water actually covers you. You sit, not lie. The bath stops being a horizontal puddle and starts behaving the way Japanese ofuro and Continental soaking tubs have for centuries — as a vessel, not a tray.
The footprint. The model specified here is the Omnitub Solo Sups, 1300 × 950mm — one of Omnitub’s wider compact rectangular tubs. At 1300mm long it sits comfortably shorter than a standard 1700mm bath, freeing up valuable floor for the walk-in shower zone in front of it. But at 950mm wide it is unusually generous across the body — closer in feel to a continental soaking vessel than a British single-bather. The result is a bath that gives you proper room to stretch, sit, and submerge, in a footprint a standard bath would have left awkwardly proportioned.
The proportions. Look at the photographs again. The bath looks substantial, not stunted. That’s the deep-tub magic. Where a short standard bath looks apologetic in a small space, an Omnitub looks intentional — almost architectural. It reads as a design feature, not a fallback.
The build. Each Omnitub is hand-finished in Britain in Omnigel — our proprietary seven-layer reinforced composite. The waterline you see in these photographs is glass-flat. The corners are precise. The edges are deep and squared. None of that happens on a moulded production line — it happens because the brand still treats every bath as a craftsmanship project.
This, for clients sitting in homes built by craftsmen 150 years ago, matters more than the spec sheet suggests.
The design: emerald, brass and a confident hand
A deep bath alone doesn’t make a bathroom remarkable. What Forazzi has done around the Omnitub is what elevates this from “well-resolved compact bathroom” to “the photograph stops you mid-scroll.”
Glazed emerald tile, stack-bond, floor to ceiling
The bath alcove and shower wall are wrapped in a long-format, hand-glazed emerald tile, laid in a vertical stack-bond. Three things are working at once:
- The glaze is irregular. Light catches it differently across the wall, the way it does on antique zellige. The room is never visually flat.
- The format is long and narrow. Run vertically and tightly grouted, those tiles draw the eye up, lifting the perceived ceiling height — a classic Edinburgh tenement-bathroom trick that works as well now as it did in 1890.
- The colour is brave but grounded. Emerald reads as nature, as botanical, as old English library — never as gimmick. It’s a colour you live with.
Brushed brass, used like jewellery
Brushed brass appears throughout — the bath filler, the shower riser and rainhead, the handheld, the tall basin mixer, the toilet flush plate, the tile trim around the niche, the radiator valves, even the framing of the shower screen.
It’s a lot of brass on paper. In the room it never reads as too much. Two reasons: every brass piece is the same finish (brushed, warm, matte — not polished, not yellow-gold), and the brass is anchored by the deep emerald and the warm walnut. Brass against pure white can look like a showroom. Brass against forest green and timber looks like a Soho House guest bathroom.
Fluted walnut vanity, oval vessel basin
The vanity is the supporting actor that nearly steals the scene — a wall-hung, fluted walnut unit with a white solid-surface top and an oval white vessel basin. The vertical reeding on the door fronts echoes the vertical run of tile on the opposite wall. Nothing in this room is accidentally aligned.
The basin sits on the surface rather than dropping into it, which raises the working height comfortably and frees up the slim runner of light grey horizontal tile behind it to read as backdrop, not background noise.
Light grey horizontal tile, used as a quieting layer
Below the dado line and around the vanity, Forazzi has dropped in a paler, slightly textured horizontal tile. This is deliberate restraint — without it, the emerald would dominate every wall and the room would feel smaller, not larger. The grey acts as a visual exhale. It’s also where the brass hardware reads cleanest.
Warm-toned floor
Underfoot, a warm mid-brown porcelain tile in a large format. Practical, warm, low-grout, and a perfect tonal bridge between the walnut vanity and the cooler greens and greys above.
The layout move: a true wet zone, not a half-measure
The single smartest planning decision in this bathroom is the way Forazzi has merged the walk-in shower and the bath into a single tiled wet zone, divided only by a slim brass-framed glass screen.
In a narrow tenement bathroom, conventional logic says: bath at one end, separate shower enclosure at the other, fight for floorspace, lose on both. Forazzi has thrown that out.
Here:
- The shower drains to a low-profile linear tray, tiled almost flush with the surrounding floor.
- The Omnitub sits directly behind the shower zone, in the alcove under the window.
- The brass-framed glass screen runs only as far as it needs to. Above and beyond it, the green tile continues uninterrupted.
- Both the shower and the bath share the same emerald tile envelope, so the eye reads one luxurious, immersive zone instead of two competing ones.
The result is a bathroom where the wet zone is the architecture. You don’t walk into a small bathroom with a shower cubicle stuck on. You walk into a tiled green sanctuary with a deep bath and a rain shower inside it.
That is a fundamentally different psychological experience — and it’s the experience that hotel design has been quietly perfecting for the last decade.
The details that separate good from outstanding
A few things worth lingering on, because this is where Forazzi’s craft really shows:
- The shower niche. Tiled into the green wall and finished with a slim brushed-brass trim. The brass frames the niche the way a picture frame frames a print. It’s a small thing. It is also the difference between a builder’s niche and a designer’s niche.
- The window above the bath. Untouched, unobscured, with a plant on the sill catching daylight. In a compact bathroom, every photon counts. Leaving the original window clear doubles the room’s perceived size.
- The illuminated mirror cabinet. Edge-lit LED, soft-touch on/off, hiding storage behind a perfectly clean glass face. No visible cabinetry on the long wall — just light and reflection.
- The wall-hung WC with brass flush plate. Floor stays clear. The brass flush plate tonally agrees with every other piece of brass in the room. Nothing rented from a different palette.
- The heated towel rail. Practical, but specified as a slim ladder profile in a finish that recedes against the tile rather than competing with the brass. A quieter piece, doing a quiet job.
- The skylight reflection on the bath. Look at the photograph of the tub from above. The geometry of the window is visible on the surface of the water. That is what the Omnitub’s deep, still waterline does — it turns the bath into a reflection of the room above it. You cannot get that effect from a shallow bath. The water won’t sit still enough or deep enough.
Why an Omnitub is the right answer for this kind of room
This project is, more than anything else, a worked example of when (and why) a deep soaking tub outperforms a standard British bath. If you’re considering a similar project, here’s what the Forazzi installation quietly proves:
You save floor area, not bath experience. A standard 1700mm bath would have eaten significantly more floor than the compact Omnitub footprint here. The shorter Omnitub frees up the square footage that made the walk-in shower and the vanity comfortably possible. Without that swap, this brief simply doesn’t fit in this room.
You gain bathing depth, not lose it. Despite the smaller footprint, you get more immersion than the standard bath would have offered. 600mm of internal depth versus the typical 400-450mm. That is a real, felt-by-the-shoulders difference, not a marketing one.
The deep silhouette is a design asset. The squared, tall sides of the Omnitub work with a tiled alcove the way a shallow standard bath never can. They give the wet zone a vertical anchor. They give the photograph its centre of gravity.
Handmade in Britain stops being a slogan. In a tenement built by hand, in a bathroom finished by an installer who clearly cares about the millimetre, an industrially mass-moulded bath would have lowered the room’s whole register. The Omnitub belongs in this company.
In the installer’s own words
We don’t normally hand the microphone over in our blog posts. But when Chris Jinks at Forazzi Bathrooms left a review for us on Google after this project — unprompted, unedited — it captured the trade-side case for an Omnitub in a tenement bathroom better than any marketing copy we could write. So we’re letting him speak for himself.
“We’ve been using Omnitub products more and more across our bathroom renovation projects, particularly in traditional long, narrow tenement bathrooms where layout options are usually extremely limited.
The ability to position the bath at the window end of the room completely transforms what’s possible with the space. In many older properties, a standard bath overlaps the door wall and compromises the entire layout, whereas the Omnitub design frees up valuable floor space and allows for a far more practical and comfortable bathroom design.
This flexibility gives us much better options for positioning sinks, toilets and storage, while still creating a genuinely comfortable bathing and showering area. Depending on the room, we can install a shower over the bath or, where space allows, incorporate a separate shower enclosure alongside it — layouts that simply wouldn’t work with a conventional bath.
From an installer’s perspective, it’s a product that genuinely solves real-world design and space-planning challenges while still delivering a premium finish for the customer. A fantastic concept and a product we’ll continue specifying in future projects.”
— Chris Jinks, Forazzi Bathrooms (review on Google)
There are a few sentences in there worth pulling out, because they’re the ones we hear echoed by installer after installer:
- “The ability to position the bath at the window end of the room completely transforms what’s possible with the space.” This project is the photograph of that sentence. The bath is under the window — exactly where it couldn’t have gone with a 1700mm standard.
- “In many older properties, a standard bath overlaps the door wall and compromises the entire layout.” This is the single most common reason Edinburgh bathrooms end up with a wet-room-only refit. People assume the bath has to go. With an Omnitub it doesn’t.
- “Layouts that simply wouldn’t work with a conventional bath.” The merged wet zone you see in this project is one of those layouts. A standard bath would have made it geometrically impossible.
When the installer and the manufacturer are saying the same thing, with the photographs to prove it, it stops being marketing and starts being a method.
The spec sheet
For anyone planning something similar — or simply wanting the brass-tacks version:
- Bath: Omnitub Solo Sups, 1300 × 950mm — small rectangular deep soaking tub, 600mm internal depth, handmade in Britain
- Shower: Brushed brass concealed thermostatic valve, square rainhead, brushed brass handheld on slide
- Bath filler: Brushed brass deck-mounted bath taps
- Basin: Oval white vessel basin on solid-surface top
- Basin tap: Tall brushed brass single-lever mixer
- Vanity: Wall-hung fluted walnut unit
- WC: Wall-hung pan with concealed cistern, brushed brass flush plate
- Mirror: LED edge-lit mirror cabinet
- Shower screen: Brushed brass framed clear glass
- Wall tile (feature): Long-format glazed emerald tile, vertical stack-bond
- Wall tile (lower / vanity): Light grey textured horizontal tile
- Floor: Warm-toned large-format porcelain
- Heated towel rail: Slim ladder profile
- Niche: Tiled, brushed brass trim
- Designed & installed by: Forazzi Bathrooms — Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer, Edinburgh
About Forazzi Bathrooms — Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer
A note on the team behind this build, because they deserve it.
Forazzi Bathrooms are, quite simply, Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer. That isn’t a marketing line. It’s the position they’ve earned by becoming the people Edinburgh, Glasgow and central-belt homeowners call when an off-the-shelf bathroom company has just told them their tenement bathroom is “too small for a proper bath.”
Tenement bathrooms are their specialism — long, narrow, period-property rooms with original windows in the wrong place, ceilings taller than they are wide, and floorplans that punish a clumsy specification. Most national bathroom brands quietly avoid them. Forazzi has built an entire studio practice around them.
That’s why our partnership with Forazzi is the partnership it is. Omnitub designs and hand-builds compact deep soaking tubs in Britain specifically to solve the geometric problem the British tenement bathroom poses. Forazzi installs them, every week, in the rooms those baths were designed for. The product and the practitioner are aimed at the same target — and the projects that come out the other end are the proof.
If you’re a Scottish homeowner with a compact, period or tenement bathroom and you want it done properly, Forazzi is the team to talk to.
A final word on craft
The reason we keep coming back to Forazzi Bathrooms — and the reason they keep specifying Omnitub — is that this is a partnership built on the same philosophy from two ends of the supply chain. We make every bath by hand in Britain because we believe the bath is the most important object in the bathroom, and the most important object in the bathroom shouldn’t come off a faceless production line. Forazzi installs every bathroom the same way, because they believe the same thing.
When the maker and the installer agree on what “good” looks like, the client gets a room like this. Not just a bathroom that works. A bathroom that, frankly, ruins you for any rental, hotel, or holiday cottage you’ll ever stay in again.
If your home has a compact bathroom you’ve quietly given up on — a tenement, a Victorian terrace, a city flat, a loft conversion, a guest annex — please don’t put a shallow bath in it. Don’t put a wet-room-only in it because you assumed there wasn’t space. There almost certainly is space. Forazzi has just shown you what’s possible inside it.
Ready to see what an Omnitub could do in your bathroom?
- Shop the bath in this project — Omnitub Solo Sups, 1300 × 950mm →
- Browse the full deep soaking tub range →
- Compact rectangular Solo bath (1050 × 750) →
- Solo Plus (1250 × 750) →
- Looking for a square footprint? See the Duo →
- Need an installer in Scotland? Forazzi Bathrooms — Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer — accept selected projects across Edinburgh, Glasgow and the central belt. Get in touch with us for an introduction.
Every Omnitub is handmade to order in Britain. Lead times, dimensions and current stock are confirmed at checkout.
Photography: Forazzi Bathrooms Bath: Omnitub deep soaking tub, handmade in Britain Project location: Edinburgh, UK