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bellajourney

What color curtains and towels for this bathroom?

14 years ago

Hi everyone!

The main bath is functional and I am itching to trade in my "designer" garbage bag curtains for some real ones!

This bathroom had a partial makeover (since we are on a budget and are planning to eventually gut it and steal some sq footage for a laundry room). It has new shower tile, tub and toilet. The walls were painted BM Beacon Gray to match the accent tile in the shower. The floor and vanity (which is begging for a makeover) are unchanged.

What color curtains would you recommend? Dark brown, maybe the darker top blue from the curtain, white, ivory? I'm so torn! Also - what color towels would you get as well?

Colors are pretty true in this shot

Colors are a little too dark here, but I wanted to include the floor too:

Colors are good here too (excuse the shadow!)

And this is the dated vanity that is on the list for a makeover! (I want to stain or paint the wood a dark brown like the top color of the shower curtain, give it chrome hardware, and get a similarly colored ivory countertop without a shell shaped sink!) A large mirror above the vanity will hopefully be installed in another week or so.

THANK YOU!!! :)

Comments (10)

  • 14 years ago

    I love the combo of blue and chocolate brown. I would look for a nice rich brown.

  • 14 years ago

    My son's room is painted Beacon Gray! I agree that a brown (light or dark) would like nice. Or a cream colored towel might look nice if you don't want anything dark.

  • 14 years ago

    If you go to Etsy, they have a ton of people that make the cutest curtains and many of them are really reasonable. I found these for our bathroom and paid a song for them when you consider they were hand made to order.

  • 14 years ago

    I think a curtain with the dark brown and at least one of the blues would look nice.

    I think you could go with any colors of the shower curtain, except the light blue, for towels. My first thought was dark brown but depending on what curtain you use, along with the dark vanity, maybe something lighter would be better. Wow, I'm sure that was so helpful!

    Check out SW Woodsy Brown for a rich brown paint color. I used it on an oak vanity as well as my stairs. It's a dark chocolate brown color.

  • 14 years ago

    I'd have to play around with the fabric to see whether or not I liked this idea, but I was thinking you could buy another shower curtain and cut out all the stripes in the center, maybe keeping a little brown, maybe not, and then piecing it so the stripes would hang vertically and make a valence. You could do grommet rings across the top and run a rod through them, and that would kind of match the grommets in your shower curtain. Underneath that you could have blinds or maybe an up or down cellular shade in a light neutral color that's in the shower curtain. If you think that's a possibility, you might be able to print out your picture on paper and get some crayons or markers and play around with the idea before you bought anything. You'd have to do some measuring accounting for seam allowances, etc., to see if you had enough fabric for the width with just one curtain.

    I thought of a valence because you're going to end up with a lot of fabric in that one corner with the shower curtain, curtains and then the towels hanging directly underneath. A valence would break it up a little.

  • 14 years ago

    I recently put a medium blue curtain in one of our bathrooms. It made the room so dark (and others thought so too), that I took it down after one day. So, if you want light in your bathroom, why not think about just having the lower window frosted.

    I do like the suggestion for purchasing another shower curtain and making it into a curtain. However, any curtain is going to make the bathroom dark, IMO.

  • 14 years ago

    That window is very close to the shower curtain, and the shower curtain is a dominate pattern. Any fabric except an exact match is going to look strange, IMO.

    I would do something like Lukkiirish did - plain shower curtain and colorful window curtain. Or a top down-bottom up white cellular shade. Or one-inch white wood slat blinds.

    And white towels - always white towels.

  • 14 years ago

    I would just use frosting film on the window to let in the most light. Towels could be either dark brown or the darker blue, or both.

  • 14 years ago

    If a curtain is necessary, I would match the lightest tan on the shower curtain and put a simple one on the window and mix the towels with blue, brown and the curtain color. If the window isn't used, I'd consider the frosting film as metioned already.

  • 14 years ago

    Hi everyone! Thank you all So much for your replies and great ideas! (lukkiirish - your bathroom is beautiful!!)

    I talked them all over with DH.
    - He isn't a fan of window film - he wants to have a clear view of the outside in the daytime (we'll only close the curtains at night).
    - We do want to keep the shower curtain as the "star" of the bathroom, and agree that a medium to dark toned curtain will make the bathroom too dark, so that's out.
    - So, we're thinking that we'll keep the window curtains plain and will stick with either white or an ivory that matches the bottom of the shower curtain. (I do like the custom made etsy curtain idea, and will save that for our kitchen windows! Wish I was talented enough to do it myself!)

    As for towels, I found out that there are Matching towels for the shower curtain!
    I'm thinking of getting JUST the hand towels. (I tried some mockups of the striped bath towel but it seemed too busy and competed with the shower curtain):

    So, what do you think? White or Ivory curtains? And what color bath towels? (Or maybe I should get a few different color sets of towels to change it up every so often?)
    I made a crude mockup of the bathroom components with the vanity in a dark brown (I will check out SW Woodsy Brown - thanks, sheesharee!). The tub, toilet, baseboard and moulding are white. The shower tiles, floor tiles, vanity counter and bottom of the shower curtain are all a shade of ivory.

    Various curtain/bath towel options:

    Also - as you can see from the mockups, I'm thinking of using 2 cafe curtains to let in the most light possible. It's a 2nd floor bath, and we don't need the top of the window covered ever. But, we do need to cover the lower portion at night. Good idea?

    Thanks, again! (And sorry for the delayed reply! We had a busy weekend!)