The Glamour of Concrete
Dear Suzy,
I am remodeling a bathroom and was wondering if you could give me some
ideas. I am adding a shower and I definitely do not want a fiberglass shower
and don’t want to tile the walls either. What I was thinking of doing is
putting a coat of mortar (cement, sand, and water) over the green drywall.
Would this work? Is it waterproof enough? – Richard De V.
Dear Mr. Mortar-fied,
I thought I’d go to my columnist’s grave without the chance to brag about
my concrete bathroom. I’m so glad you asked. When Richard and I built
our latest hacienda none of the tried-and-true bathroom materials suited my
fancy. I’m way past the age when cleaning grout with a tooth brush seems as
glamorous as it once did. And I swore off fiberglass shower stalls after I
served my two year sentence in a trailer house when I was in junior high
school. Giant slabs of granite or travertine or Italian marble? Yeah, sure, on
what the Chronicle pays me?
So Richard and I did what we had done to many surfaces in our new home – like
the floors and the counter tops and the hot tub and even light fixtures: we
covered it with cement. Richard dragged 6,000 lbs. of WonderBoard, a fabulous
but heavy sheet material that eliminates the need for the mortar bed in tiled
showers, into the bathroom and screwed it to the walls of the shower and four
feet high on the other walls as a “wainscoting.” Using fancy crown molding as a
form, he made a cool concrete ledge above the wainscoting and in the shower to
hold soap, shampoo, gewgaws, and dead spiders. He slathered mortar over the
whole thing and worked his shoulder right out of its socket rubbing it
smooth.
Then I smeared the entire bathroom with every kind and color of stain that I
could lay my hands on – Minwax Wood Stains, Behr Waterbased Eurocolors, Behr
Semi-Solid Concrete Stain – until it was a wildly mottled terra cotta color
I’ve grown to love. (I thought I wanted a white bathroom.) Since then I’ve seen
a picture of a chic concrete bathroom in the Jan/Feb 1994 issue of American
Homestyle. The bathroom elicited so much interest from readers, the
magazine ran another bleep about it in this year’s Aug/Sept issue, noting that
the subtle cream color was achieved with “Rainbow Cement Colors”
(212/431-7932). Not that I would trade my burnt orange bath for all the
University of Texas alumni in Memorial Stadium.
So far, we haven’t had any moisture problem, but then again, I haven’t
admitted that we take most of our showers outside in our swanky shower house
covered with vines and open to the breezes. – Suzy
This article appears in August 25 • 1995 and August 25 • 1995 (Cover).