Bathrooms Gotham, Nottinghamshire

The village in Nottinghamshire, pronounced “Goat-em” locally, between Ruddington and East Leake — the one the New York nickname was borrowed from, and nothing to do with Batman.

It is a village of around sixteen hundred people with older brick and stone cottages, postwar housing and limited modern infill, some of it connected to the gypsum industry that worked the hills here.

We fit bathrooms across Gotham and the villages nearby from our showroom on Derby Road in Stapleford, ten miles north, about twenty-four minutes.

The older cottages

Nothing in this housing was built with a bathroom in the plan. They were converted from something else later, which is why so few of them are a sensible shape.

Fitted furniture is the practical answer — it can be scribed to walls that are not straight rather than sat against them with a filler panel covering the gap. Where a room is genuinely awkward, with a boxed-in soil stack or a section of ceiling sloping under the roof, building to the room is the only way to use the space rather than work round it.

Ventilation matters most in solid-walled cottages. Extraction ducted properly outside on a run-on timer, or the plaster takes the moisture and the paint lifts within a couple of winters.

Unused height above a standard vanity is common in these rooms and is the cheapest storage available if it is designed in.