My Easy-Clean, Walk-In Shower Design

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"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works."
- Steve Jobs -

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Don't you love cleaning the shower?

What's that, not so much?

If your tub or shower has glass walls, metal fittings, sliding tracks, or any combination of the above, you know first hand how the metal corrodes and the glass doors and all the hinges, tracks, and fittings become scum-coated collectors of filth and disease.

Clean body, clean shower? ~ Image courtesy of bruce mars

Keeping conventional showers clean and presentable is a job only a professional could appreciate, and then only for the right price.

Years ago,

my wife and I enjoyed touring new upscale home shows and dreaming. One of the things that we took note of in the better home designs was showers large enough that they needed neither shower curtains nor doors.

Dirty shower doors, ugggh! ~ Image courtesy of Tertia van Rensburg

Minus those "standard" accessories,

it was quite obvious to us that less was more. Showers absent those "necessities" would be not only more durable, but far, far easier to clean.

The day finally came when we had the budget and decided to remodel our bathrooms. Recalling our tours of upscale houses, my design neurons kicked in.

Could a walk-in shower be scaled down?

Could one possibly fit within the confines of a standard sized bathroom? I was convinced that it could.

Sketch of shower layout. ~ Original image by @creatr

Never having seen one that small,

I was somewhat cautious and designed the layout that you see in the image above. We enlarged our bathrooms slightly to accommodate showers about a foot and a half longer than the standard five-foot bathtubs they replaced.

Top of outside wall. ~ Original image by @creatr

The shower wall.

I designed the shower wall to extend above the height of the shower head in order to prevent water from splashing out over the top. There is of course no reason why the wall could not go all the way to the ceiling. We left a gap at the top to allow light from skylights in the main area of the bathrooms to shine into the shower.

Shelf embedded inside shower wall. ~ Original image by @creatr

On the inner wall,

I placed a sunken shelf for soap, shampoo, razors, and etc. Don't forget to slope the shelf slightly; not enough that the bottles slide off, but enough to ensure that water flows off and down the drain.

Shower entry from outside. ~ Original image by @creatr

Look, Ma, no door!

The entryway is simply surrounded with tile. Without a door, it is a nice continuous surface, easy to access and clean with conventional tile cleaners. In reality (unlike conventional entrances), the entryway rarely needs cleaning.

Shower entry from inside. ~ Original image by @creatr

The entry has a curb.

The curb need only be an inch or two high, as it is the furthest thing from the shower head. Any drips falling there just flow towards the shower drain in the front of the shower.

Front of shower with controls. ~ Original image by @creatr

Changes we would make.

Reflecting on the design and our experience, there are a few changes that I would make the next time around.

First of all, I have no doubt at all that a walk-in shower could be successfully designed to fit into the standard five-foot bathtub footprint. We have never even remotely approached a situation where water threatened to splash out of the exit of these extra long enclosures.

Second, I would design a small, downward sloping access port that would allow me to reach through the wall and turn the shower on before entering. If you have a circulating hot water system, you would perhaps not need that feature.

Note that on the diagram (repeated below) the reach through access port would be at the height of the faucet, above the bench and to the left of the embedded shelf.

Sketch of shower layout. ~ Original image by @creatr

One final word of caution:

When it comes time to install the shower pan and floor, don't cut corners.

Shower pans used to be made of metal and soldered together at the corners. Nowadays, a typical shower pan is made of some kind of plastic or rubber material. The tradesman who installed ours should have simply folded the corners of the pan. Sadly, instead he cut and glued the corners.

The result? Unfortunately, one of the two shower pans inevitably leaked, causing no end of headaches. Fortunately, being an ethical workman, the tradesman came back later and spent considerable time and trouble applying a sealer to the grout. That treatment seems to have stemmed the tide. But oh, the struggle!

So, it's worth repeating; don't cut corners!

We've lived with these showers now for decades.

My wife's appreciation for relief from conventional shower cleaning knows no bounds. This is one of the few things I've done for her that, to this day, she will unexpectedly stop and say "Honey, thank you for my showers."

Gentlemen, I ask you, How cool is that?

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~FIN~

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This article also appears on my Whaleshares blog.

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