I recently remodelled my tiny 1.6 m2 bathroom, commonly known as “Copenhagen Bathroom” here. These bathrooms exist in buildings that were not intended to house private toilet and showers, but things changed over the second part of the 20th century.

So here we are, left with 1.6m in length and 1m narrow bathroom (at its widest), and a renovation bill similar to a much bigger bathroom, sadly! Fitting everything here is more or less impossible, so optimizing it of course required a lot of design iterations in 3D drawings…

This is what I ended up with:

Compared to my original bathroom, it is quite an upgrade… The horror:

We allowed friends to draw on the walls, and we enjoyed their odd quotes and more or less perverted thoughts, until we finally got to renovating.

As you can see, the toilet has been moved to a corner, allowing less space to walk in, but crucially allowing a separate shower niche without getting the toilet and floor wet all-over when taking showers.

I tried dusins of sinks, and looked at thousands online, but I kept hitting a block: Either, the sink was too small for my hands, or it was too big to comfortable fit in the bathroom. I had an idea, but I had trouble finding what I wanted.

The idea is: If I use a round (table-top) wash basin, I can keep it pretty small, but comfortably big if fitted almost at the wall. This saves the about 10cm that most sinks will have to place a water tap, hand soap, and so on. The round shape leaves more room for shoulders when sitting on the toilet, too…

But then, another benefit of the round sink is that I thought the tap could be placed at one of its corners without wasting any space that the sink didn’t already take up! I searched, and searched, and finally I found what I was looking for: Sapho Tetris designed and sold in the Czech Republic. A great product, really. However, after contacting all vendors, and the manufacturer, it turned out that it could not be delivered in time, even though I would accept EUR 100+ in shipping costs alone… Back to the drawing board, literally!

I designed my own solution like I had initially imagined. A single piece of flat sheet metal, 3mm thick in stainless steel, polished and laser cut to my specifications.

Here is the design, with a robust, stainless angle bracket superimposed. I created a 14mm hole specifically to attach the angle bracket I bought to carry the weight of the washbasin.

You may notice that it is not completely symmetric. I thought, and still find, that it is not visible when the sink is placed on top, and it gives some extra shelf space inspired by the Sapho Tetris, while saving more space at other places.

Here is the final bill to order it from laserboost.eu:

As you can see, it’s not cheap to have a single piece shipped. The price falls dramatically for a higher number of units produced, but sadly I couldn’t really take advantage of that.

The plan worked out, and the angle bracket fit after some trouble finding a single stainless M14 bolt.

Here is the result! A bit of an industrial look. I’m quite happy with it. Size is great. Functionality too, except I put the tap a few millimeters too close to the wall, so the handle will gently hit the wall in some positions.