Bathrooms Newton, Nottinghamshire

To be clear about which Newton: this is the village near Bingham in the Vale of Belvoir, off the A46. There are several others in the East Midlands and they are all somewhere else.

We fit bathrooms here and across the Vale villages — Bingham, East Bridgford, Granby, Cropwell Bishop and Cropwell Butler — from our showroom on Derby Road in Stapleford, seventeen miles west, about half an hour on the A52.

Village housing

Newton is small. The housing is mostly period property with postwar development around it, some of it connected to the former airfield.

Bathrooms in the older buildings were carved out of something else — a box room, part of a bedroom, occasionally the end of a landing — which is why so few of them are a sensible shape. Thick walls, ceilings that change from room to room, and floors that have settled.

Fitted furniture is the answer in that situation, because it can be scribed to walls that wander rather than sat against them with a filler strip hiding the gap. Where there is unused height above a standard vanity — common in these houses — building up into it turns a basin unit into real storage.

Ventilation is the thing most worth getting right in solid-walled village property. Extraction ducted properly to the outside on a run-on timer. Without it the moisture goes into the plaster and the paint lifts within a couple of winters.

Where a property is listed, alterations affecting the fabric can need consent from Rushcliffe Borough Council — including a new extract vent through a visible elevation, which people rarely expect. It seldom stops a bathroom. It regularly changes where the extraction runs.