A traditional chrome thermostatic shower. A 600mm-deep Omnitub. A wall of crisp white subway tile wrapped in deep mauve panelling. All inside a tenement footprint a lot of designers would have given up on.
When “small” stops being a problem
Walk into this Edinburgh bathroom and the first thing that happens is your eye stops measuring it. The mauve walls and ceiling pull the room together rather than fighting against the narrow plan. The monochrome hex floor anchors it. The brass wall sconce, the chrome fixtures and the white subway tile keep it light. And the bath — a white Omnitub Deluxe 1700 × 750 — sits at the far end of the room, anchoring the whole composition.
That bath is what makes the rest of this work. And it is the reason this room, on paper one of the more challenging compact bathroom briefs in the city, now reads less like a tenement bathroom and more like a small, perfectly-resolved boutique hotel suite.
Forazzi Bathrooms — Scotland’s number one tenement bathroom installer — designed and fitted this bathroom on St Stephen Street, Edinburgh. We’ve worked with the team on more than one project now (you can also see their later emerald-and-brass build). The recurring theme is the same one that’s defined our partnership from the start: what if a compact bathroom didn’t have to compromise on the bath at all?
The answer Forazzi delivered here is not a small bath crammed into a small room. It’s a proper, immersive, shoulder-deep soak — paired with a traditional thermostatic shower, a wall-hung basin, and a colour palette that turns “narrow Edinburgh tenement bathroom” into “the photograph stops you mid-scroll.”
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 features 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 daily-use shower over the bath, traditionally detailed.
- Storage that didn’t dominate the room.
- A look with character — no magnolia-and-chrome safety play.
- All of it inside a footprint that most off-the-shelf British baths simply will not deliver a real soak in.
Standard 1700mm baths exist in every showroom in the country. The problem is rarely the length — the problem is the depth. At 380–450mm internal depth, a conventional bath delivers the same lukewarm, half-submerged experience the client was already trying to escape.
The fix wasn’t cosmetic. It was the bath itself. Same length, same width, same alcove. Different vessel.
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 into the alcove at the far end of the room with white subway tile wrapping the surround.
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 Deluxe, 1700 × 750mm — our most popular model. It drops into the same footprint as a standard British 1700 × 750 bath, so plumbing stays where it is, the alcove stays where it is, and the tiler doesn’t have to redraw their plan. The swap is structural without being structural.
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. Tall sides, deep silhouette, glass-flat waterline. It reads as a design feature, not a fallback.
The build. Each Omnitub is hand-finished at our workshop in Lympsham, North Somerset, in Omnigel — our proprietary seven-layer reinforced composite. We don’t mass-produce overseas and import containers. Every tub is built to order, which means the corners are precise, the edges are deep and squared, and the colour is whatever the client asks for. None of that happens on a moulded production line — it happens because we still treat 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: mauve, subway tile 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 a room you’d genuinely want to spend time in.
White subway tile, classic running bond, alcove and shower wall
The bath alcove and shower wall are wrapped in crisp white subway tile, laid in a traditional running bond. Three things are working at once:
- The tile reflects light. A glossy white surround in a north-facing tenement bathroom adds back the daylight the original ceiling height steals. The room is brighter for it.
- The format is the right one for the architecture. A standard subway tile is a 19th-century shape in a 19th-century building. Nothing imported, nothing modern-trying-too-hard.
- The white is the foil. Without it, the deep mauve elsewhere in the room would feel oppressive. With it, the mauve becomes intentional.
Recessed niches, framed in subway tile
Above the bath, two recessed niches sit either side of the shower controls — built into the tiled surround, finished flush, planted with succulents. It’s a small thing. It’s also the difference between a builder’s idea of a bathroom and a designer’s idea of a bathroom.
Traditional chrome thermostatic shower, used like jewellery
Chrome appears throughout — the thermostatic shower valve, the rainhead, the handheld attachment, the bath filler, the heated towel rail, the basin tap. It’s classic, traditional, deliberately not-brass. Two reasons: every chrome piece is the same finish (polished, period-correct, not brushed), and it sits cleanly against the white subway tile and the deep mauve panelling without competing with the brass sconce on the wall opposite.
Traditional chrome against crisp subway tile, in a tenement bathroom, is the historically-correct answer. It looks like it was always there.
Deep mauve walls and ceiling, used as a colour drape
The walls and ceiling are wrapped in a deep mauve — a colour brave enough to be a decision, grounded enough to be liveable. Painting the ceiling the same colour is the single move that pulls the whole room together. It removes the visual lid that a plain white ceiling places on a narrow space, lets the eye travel up rather than stopping at the cornice, and makes the room feel like a continuous interior rather than a bathroom-shaped box.
Mauve tongue-and-groove bath panelling
The bath panel itself is matched to the wall colour in tongue-and-groove timber. That’s what gives the bath surround its built-in, custom-cabinetry feel. A standard white bath panel would have severed the bath visually from the rest of the room. Matching panelling makes the bath read as architecture.
Monochrome hexagonal floor
Underfoot, a black-and-white hexagonal mosaic — small format, high pattern density, properly traditional. It’s the single most period-correct floor for a Scottish tenement bathroom. It also breaks up the colour intensity overhead, gives the room a foundation, and reads cleanly against the chrome and the white tile.
The layout move: bath at the window end, shower over the top
The single smartest planning decision in this bathroom is what Forazzi didn’t do. They didn’t carve a separate shower enclosure out of the floor plan. They didn’t push the bath into an awkward corner. They didn’t reduce the bath to a shower-bath compromise.
Instead:
- The bath sits in the alcove at the far end, where it would have always sat in the original plan.
- A glass shower screen drops down beside the bath — fixed, half-height, just enough to contain the spray.
- The shower runs over the bath, properly thermostatically valved, with both rainhead and handheld so it works as a real daily shower, not a token one.
- The chrome heated towel rail sits on the side wall, right beside the bath where it warms the towel you’ll actually reach for.
- The wall-hung basin tucks into the entry wall opposite — out of the bath’s working space.
In a narrow tenement bathroom, the conventional logic says: bath at one end, separate shower at the other, fight for floorspace, lose on both. Forazzi has thrown that out. The bath is the shower zone. The shower zone is the bath. The room reads as a single, coherent interior with a deep soak at its centre — not a small bathroom with a shower cubicle stuck on.
That is a fundamentally different psychological experience — and it’s what makes this room feel substantial despite its footprint.
The details that separate good from outstanding
A few things worth lingering on, because this is where Forazzi’s craft really shows:
- The brass wall sconce. The single piece of warm metal in a room of cool chrome. It anchors the wall opposite the bath, throws warm light across the mauve, and stops the chrome from feeling clinical. One brass piece, perfectly placed. It’s a confident move.
- The wall-hung basin. Floor stays clear. Plumbing tucks behind the wall. The room reads less crowded for it.
- The glass shower screen. Frameless, fixed, no chrome trim cluttering the visual line. Just glass — clean enough that the eye reads straight through it to the bath beyond.
- The heated towel rail. Slim chrome ladder profile. Practical, but specified to recede against the mauve rather than competing with the chrome shower fittings.
- The tongue-and-groove bath panel. Matched to the wall colour, mitred at the corners, finished like furniture. The single most-overlooked detail in compact bathroom design — and the one that makes or breaks the built-in feel.
- The hex tile grout. Tight, dark, period-correct. Wide pale grout would have killed the foundation. Tight dark grout makes the floor read as a single textured surface.
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 don’t lose a single millimetre of floor. The Omnitub Deluxe drops into the same 1700 × 750 footprint as a standard bath. There is no negotiation here. No structural rework, no replumbing, no compromise to fit it.
You gain bathing depth — substantially. 600mm of internal depth versus the typical 380–450mm. 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 and a tongue-and-groove panel the way a shallow standard bath never can. They give the bath surround 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 Chris Jinks at Forazzi Bathrooms left a review for us on Google after he started specifying Omnitub on tenement projects — unprompted, unedited — and it captured the trade-side case for an Omnitub 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)
This project is the photograph of his first sentence. The bath is at the window end. The room works because of it.
The spec sheet
For anyone planning something similar — or simply wanting the brass-tacks version:
- Bath: Omnitub Deluxe, 1700 × 750mm — rectangular deep soaking tub in white, 600mm internal depth, handmade in Britain
- Bath panel: Custom mauve tongue-and-groove timber panelling, colour-matched to walls
- Shower: Traditional chrome thermostatic shower valve with rainhead and handheld attachment
- Bath filler: Chrome thermostatic bath filler integrated into shower valve
- Basin: Compact wall-hung basin with chrome single-lever mixer
- WC: Standard white WC, traditional chrome flush
- Shower screen: Frameless clear glass, fixed, half-height
- Wall tile (alcove + shower): White subway tile, traditional running bond
- Wall finish (rest of room): Deep mauve paint, walls and ceiling
- Floor: Black-and-white hexagonal mosaic tile
- Lighting: Brass wall sconce
- Heated towel rail: Slim chrome ladder profile
- Niches: Tiled, set into the subway tile shower wall
- 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.
Forazzi Bathrooms · forazzi.co.uk · info@forazzi.co.uk · 0141 673 5737 · Free 3D designs, payment on completion, projects across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling and the central belt.
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 Deluxe, 1700 × 750mm →
- Browse the full deep soaking tub range →
- Compact rectangular Solo bath (1050 × 750) →
- Solo Plus (1250 × 750) →
- Solo Sups (1300 × 950) →
- 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 Deluxe 1700 × 750mm white deep soaking tub, handmade in Britain Project location: St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, UK