How Hilary Farr Balances Wood Tones In A Bathroom For An Elegant Look

Renovating or upgrading a room can be both incredibly exciting and somewhat daunting, especially when it comes to finding the right balance with your materials. For example, if you want to bring natural wood into your bathroom, it's important also to bring in other elements that will complement and even out the heavy wood tones so your space doesn't feel too heavy. Hilary Farr is a pro at bringing balance to interior design, and her solution for offsetting a lot of wood cabinetry and fixtures is both surprising and enticing. By bringing in blue pops of color, she turns a bathroom from an episode of Love It or List It into a nature-inspired, serene respite that is reminiscent of a spa or luxury cabin getaway. The calming presence of the blue shades helps to make the wood feel welcoming, creating the ideal backdrop for a bathroom.

If you're replacing your existing cabinets, make sure to follow Farr's sensible advice for saving money on new cabinets. Using wood in your washrooms is a great way to bring a grounded ambiance to the space. Natural elements help bring the calming aesthetic of the outdoors inside and warm up the aesthetic, transitioning a predominately sanitary space into a more cozy atmosphere. Tile and porcelain can feel sterile, but wood softens up your bathroom in a way other materials can't.

With that being said, there can be such a thing as too much wood if there aren't enough design elements to break it up. In fact, too much of anything in design can overload or overwhelm a room, especially bathrooms where you're working with more limited space (more often than not, at least). Hilary Farr renovated a dated bathroom that featured a lot of tile and white laminate, replacing all the cabinets with wood to bring the smaller room up to date. With that much wood, it could have become unbalanced, but Farr added a pop of blue with a tiled backsplash behind the mirror and a blue backlight behind the glass to brighten and make the tiles almost glow.

Blue is one of the best colors for a bathroom, thanks to its variety and flexibility. The shade of blue you use to complement the wood within your bathroom will depend on the wood itself. Lighter woods can match well with light blues and teal shades, while mid to dark wood pairs with slate blues and those with green undertones. You can still bring in lighter blue tones for darker woods, too; just play around with the paint and natural materials to ensure they produce a calming, spa-like vibe rather than an overbearing finish. For example, the navy might feel too heavy with a lot of wood cabinetry, so if you lean toward a darker shade of paint or tile, go with a minimal amount rather than a lot that could make the whole room too dark.