(via Best Advice: White Marble Countertops Pros & Cons | Apartment Therapy)

(via Before & After: A Fresh Bathroom Remodel | Apartment Therapy)

I can’t get enough of Carrara marble & black in bathrooms these days. The pink faucet is just an added bonus

(via Don’t Look Down: Elevator Shaft Powder Room Home DSGN | Apartment Therapy)

This might as well be called “interior design for trolls”. People with a fear of heights would really get the shaft in this room… a fifteen floor (!) shaft, to be precise.

(via Parisian Blues | Apartment Therapy New York)

Funny this post should come up today, after I just mentioned something similar yesterday. This (specifically the top part of the doors, above the arch) is exactly the color I was considering for my downstairs bathroom. Rich, deep, peacock-inspired blue.

(via Teal: Kind of Blue, A Little Green, Pretty Great | Apartment Therapy DC)

I’ve been tossing around black for the walls of my downstairs bathroom for quite some time… but now I’m wondering whether a rich, dark peacock blue might hit the spot.

More Luce di Luna quartzite.

For whatever reason, I’ve been spending a lot of time dreaming about renovating my kitchen and bathrooms. To say that there is no money for this endeavor is the understatement of the year, so beyond some cosmetic fixes, all of this will remain firmly in the land of makebelieve for some time yet.

What moved me to post about this, however, is a discovery I made yesterday. Now, I’ve always been a huge fan of Carrara marble, particularly the statuary subset which is predominantly white with less overall grey veining. I’ve always loved the look for countertops, floors, even wall coverings. There’s a coolness (both temperature and colorwise) to this white stone that is unmatched.

Of course, marble comes with a huuuuge caveat, which is that, as a calcite based stone, it is extremely vulnerable to acids. Yes, people complain about marble staining (from red wine, for example), but it’s the acid etching that is a bigger concern. On a honed (matte) as opposed to polished (shiny) marble surface, acid etching (this is what it looks like on a shiny surface) may be less apparent, but there are horror stories of people forgetting something acidic somewhere on their counter, only to find that the acid has eaten a hole right through their countertop!

I am not a very tidy cook (nor a tidy person in general, I must admit), yet I am also pretty anal retentive (I know, contradictory, but true), so I realized finally, with pain in my heart, that marble countertops would ultimately not be for me. Every stain, every etch, every chip (did I mention it chips easily?) would be like a wagging finger, admonishing me for my lack of attention. It would be a mistake.

… and then I discovered Luce di Luna quartzite (pictured above, in a kitchen that looks, at least in this photo, extremely similar to my own). With quartz as its primary ingredient, this stone is as resistant as you would expect granite or man-made quartz countertops to be. In fact, by all account it is sturdier than actual granite. Better yet, while quartzite comes in a wide variety of colors, Luce di Luna looks about as close to Carrara marble as you’re going to get. While the base color of the stone is grayer than Carrara, and the veining on Luce di Luna tends to run in (extremely modern) parallel lines, the similarities are striking.

With all its benefits, Luce di Luna quartzite also comes at a premium. It should be no surprise that it is much, much more expensive than many of the items on the market, including Carrara marble. Given that I’d want the countertops in the kitchen to match those in the bathrooms, at the end of the day, perhaps the most affordable solution will remain Corian in Rain Cloud, which, while clearly engineered, manages to capture a similar look at a far more palatable price.

Chalkboard Bathroom at Wieden Kennedy Dezeen | Apartment Therapy Boston

After painting the wall opposite my guest bath in chalkboard paint, and admiring the black wall trend, I’ve been seriously considering doing this to my small downstairs bathroom.

I’d prefer to use plain black paint, but I know one of my clever friends will grab a piece of chalk from the hallway and take it to the can with him, so rather than have to constantly repaint, I figured I’d cut out the middleman and go right to the blackboard paint.

Apartment Therapy San Francisco | Ceramic Bowls As Sinks

Ordinarily I loathe unnecessary patterning, but I can’t resist this authentic take on the otherwise done-to-death bathroom sink bowl. Not for me, since that kind of sink gets very messy, but I love the look here. My dream sink? A solid piece of stone (or similstone) with an unbroken line between counter and sink… no cracks or crevasses for dirt to collect.