Ways To Use Retro Glass Brick In The Bathroom

If you're a fan of glass bricks, you'll be happy to know they are still trending in home design. Since their introduction to the public in the 1930s, these retro building materials regularly pop up in a repeating cycle of trendiness, having last made a splash in the 1980s. And these aren't your grandparents' glass bricks, but a modern selection that includes bricks with color and texture. You can even add backlighting to brick structures, and build curved glass-brick walls.

The bathroom figures prominently in the trendy ways to bring retro glass blocks back into your home, bringing both functionality and elegance to a room you and your family spend a lot of time in. Since glass bricks both allow natural light in and provide privacy, they are perfectly suited to bathroom use. The versatile bricks can go a long way toward creating a spa-like environment in your bathroom. You'll find several striking uses of retro glass brick, including applications for the shower and various parts of the room.

Using frosted glass bricks or those with an ice texture is perfect for bathroom shower use because you get privacy, yet you can still see what you're doing as diffused light filters through the bricks. Anyone who happens to get a peek at you in the shower will see only a distorted figure through textured glass bricks. 

You can use it for the entire shower enclosure or as privacy screening for part of the stall. Consider using other material like tile for most of the shower but providing a glass-brick window. Glass bricks also make it possible build a curved wall for your shower. You can often skip a shower door by using the retro bricks.

You may wonder whether DIY glass brick showers are reliably strong. Built correctly to prevent improperly sealed joints and water leakage, your glass brick shower should be fine. The thickness of the glass bricks make it especially durable. While some showers are hard to clean, you can wipe down one made with glass bricks with a squeegee or cleaning cloth. You may not need to clean as often because the textured glass bricks hide water spots. More of a bath person? You can use glass bricks as a tub wall.

Need a partition between the toilet area and the rest of the bathroom or a bedroom? Glass bricks to the rescue! You can build this divider to the height of your choice and crate a pleasing design with color or textured (or both) glass bricks. Consider also these specialty bricks as a backsplash for the bathroom vanity.

Windows are highly desirable in bathrooms for ventilation because of the high level of humidity produced (and building codes in some states require windows in most rooms). Naturally, privacy is an issue with bathroom windows, so glass bricks are an excellent solution. You'll be surprised to learn benefits no one tells you about trendy glass block windows, such as the fact that they provide insulation and noise control.  

To take glass-brick design to the next level, consider a glass-brick feature wall. Here's another spot where color and texture can play a design role. A curved or backlit feature wall would make an especially distinctive statement.