Building a dream bathroom is often as much an exercise in money management as it is in design: you have to plan carefully to squeeze as many of your dream features as you can into the budget you have. In a large scale renovation, that means not just choosing between a luxury shower and a whirlpool for two, but choosing which model specifically to buy. In this game, brand names matter, and hunting for companies that offer luxury fixtures at lower prices can give you a lot more luxury mileage for your budget dollar. Ariel Bath does this by combining luxury elements with a simplified modern design.
Shower Panels
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Shower panels are one of my favorite ways to save money in a large-scale dream bathroom, and the ones from Ariel are especially stylish. In the past few years, there’s been an increased focus on big, water-intensive custom showers, but installing one from the ground up can take a big, big bite out of your bathroom budget. From rerouting plumbing to re-tiling all your walls and installing a myriad of hardware (up to and including a new water heater), custom showers can be incredibly expensive. Shower panels offer a simple and elegant solution: they attach to your existing shower arm, but reroute the flow of water to multiple shower heads and body sprayers at once, giving you that all-over water feel without having to demo your shower and upgrade your whole plumbing setup.
Steam Shower
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For a large scale remodel, I can’t recommend a steam shower strongly enough. These are enclosed showers with built in seats that allow you to sit back, relax, and breath in warm, relaxing steam, as well as enjoy a regular shower. While shower panels offer a similar experience to a custom shower, a steam shower offers more benefits still, while doing much of the same work to keep the price low. To build a steam shower from scratch, you not only need to do all the work you would tiling and redoing your plumbing to build a custom shower, but you also need to make it water and steam tight. This can, as you might imagine, get quite expensive. But a pre-made steam shower not only comes with all the plumbing built in, but picture-perfect glass walls that save you from having to tile the shower, too. Obviously, this offers a much more modern look, but can dramatically lower the cost (and effort) of getting a deluxe dream shower, while including extra special features like chromatherapy, aromatherapy, and even a built in FM radio.
Steam Bath
Going a step beyond that, some of Ariel’s steam showers offer not only a water-tight custom shower with steam functionality in a single, attractive glass piece… they also have built in whirlpool bathtubs. These complex gadgets offer a variety of different functions, including multiple body sprayers located throughout the shower, multiple shower heads, and seating for two – both for the steam shower and for jetted whirlpool tub. This option will not only save you time and money in all the ways a steam shower does, it can also save you space, allowing you to get an oversized tub for two and an extra large shower, even if you don’t have the biggest of bathrooms. The best part, though? This simple assembly that can save you lavish amounts of money on finishing work still costs about what you’d pay for one high end designer whirlpool tub alone.
Whirlpool Tubs
Now, Ariel’s whirlpool tubs aren’t the least expensive on the market. Clocking in between two and three thousand dollars, you can definitely find lower priced budget models. But as with many of their other lines, what Ariel does especially well is offer luxury whirlpool designs at a price lower than you’d expect to pay for those styles. Some Jacuzzi whirlpool tubs can run north of six thousand dollars – a very, very big investment to make, especially when you can get a similar result for a fraction of the cost. Most of their whirlpools even come with all the bells and whistles – built in disinfecting systems, auto clean functions, and heat pumps, as well as chromatherapy, LCD touch screens, FM radios, integrated bath pillows, and even built in hand showers.
Water Saving Toilets
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Similarly, Ariel’s toilets aren’t always the least expensive – if you know where to look, you can find a toilet for under $100, while Ariel’s run in the $400-500 neighborhood. But as with their whirlpools, Ariel’s toilets offer a whole host of features you wouldn’t expect to find in a budget model, and a sleek, modern design you’d pay a lot more for elsewhere. Almost all of Ariel’s toilets are dual flush models, meaning they have a “big flush” of 1.6 gallons per flush and a “little flush” of .9 gpf, which can lead to substantial water savings. More noticeably, they have sleek, sometimes geometric modern designs, including easy-to-clean smooth-surface bases, and sometimes a single piece construction that gives them a fresh, fashion-forward style. From big name designers, these contemporary toilets would cost an arm and a leg, but Ariel offers the latest in luxury modern design without the designer price tag.
What do you think of these budget friendly luxury options? Is it more important to you to get all the features you want, or to get just a few features exactly the way you want them? Let me know in the comments below!
