Powder Room & Custom Door.
A small room, in need of everything.
The powder room was original to the house — serviceable, but visually exhausted. Dated cabinetry, tired finishes, a door that felt like an afterthought. The homeowners didn't want a refresh; they wanted a full gut. Every surface, every fixture, every detail reconsidered from scratch.
Two photos. Client setting the expectations.
The homeowners arrived with something contractors rarely see — two inspiration images with a coherent point of view. Warm wood slats. Veined marble. Soft light. Minimal hardware. Our job wasn't to convince them of a direction — it was to translate that mood into the actual footprint of the actual room.
From there, the work was translation. First the existing conditions — a dimensioned floor plan to confirm what we were working with. Then the design study — slats on two walls, marble on the feature wall, vessel sink floating on a custom stone slab, the door reimagined as a quiet design element rather than a utility.
When nothing fits, have it made.
The room's width wasn't standard. The homeowners spent weeks looking for a vanity that would fit the footprint and that they'd actually want to live with — and came up empty every time. A piece the right size was the wrong style; a piece the right style was the wrong size.
So we stopped shopping. I called a local stone fabricator I'd worked with before, took the measurements off the framing, and had a custom quartz sink cut to the exact opening. No compromise on width, no compromise on style.
The faucet was the next detail. Rather than default to a deck-mounted faucet that would force the sink rim to dictate the whole composition, we specified a wall-mounted faucet placed at a height calculated to deliver water cleanly into the basin — high enough to be generous, low enough to avoid splashover on the wall behind it.
And the finish: matte black, Kohler. Westchester has hard water. Most matte black fixtures spot white within a year as the minerals dry on the surface. In my experience, Kohler's is the only matte black finish that holds up to it — which is why we spec it every time, even when the client would prefer something cheaper.
Everything you need. Nothing you see.
The inspiration photos showed a wall-hung toilet with the usual clutter around it — a toilet paper holder bolted to the wall, bathroom accessories stacked on the floor, a hand cleaner bottle tucked in a corner. The aesthetic wanted minimalism; the reality of daily use was in the way.
The fix was to build storage into the architecture, not onto it. We framed a recessed niche into the wall to the right of the toilet — fully finished in matte black — to house the paper, a brush, and anything else that would otherwise sit in the line of vision. A small cost in framing and finish, a significant difference in the room's composition.
The same logic applied to the outlet. Code requires a receptacle in a powder room, but nothing in the code says it has to be visible. We built a second small niche to the left of the sink and capped it with a hinged custom stone panel that matches the surrounding wall. With the panel closed, the wall reads as continuous stone. When you need the outlet, it's there.
A wall that finished the room.
The door wasn't in the original scope. The room was nearly complete when we realized that a dated pocket door on a boring eggshell wall couldn't coexist with the renovated powder room. The rest of the finishes were having a conversation; the door was interrupting it.
So we added a second project in parallel — create an accent microcement wall and finish the look with a custom sliding door to match the envelope of the room itself.
The finish was microcement — a mineral-based, hand-troweled cementitious coating that reads closer to plaster than paint. Three coats, sanded between, sealed at the end. Each coat goes on wet, cures overnight, and leaves a subtly different texture depending on how the trowel was held. No two walls made this way are the same.
Wired into the door and its flanking side panels is a continuous LED system — soft-glow light strips that wash the microcement with a gentle halo. A concealed control panel behind the door's frame (visible mid-install in the microcement photo above) lets the user dim from night-light to full illumination and shift between four color modes: warm yellow, cool blue, orange, and red. The powder room becomes ambient, utilitarian, or theatrical, depending on the mood of the moment.
No switch plate on the wall. No exposed hardware. The light appears to belong to the door itself.
