Bathroom / Powder room

A bathroom is really two rooms sharing a name, and art that works in one is often wrong in the other. The family bathroom has a bath or a shower in it, so it has steam, and the people who live there look at it every day for years. The powder room has neither — no bath, no steam, a guest in it for ninety seconds, and the door shut the rest of the week. Both are on this page, so the quickest way through it is to decide which one you are hanging in before you decide what you like.

The steamy half is botanical and coastal. Eucalyptus and navy leaf sets in twos, threes and fours, a turquoise fern pair, seashells painted in beige, blue, turquoise and coral, blue seaweed, and the striped hydrangea pairs that sit between coastal and grandmillennial. These subjects earn their place because a bathroom is already busy — tile, mirror, taps, towels, a window with the blind half down. Foliage and shells read as calm against hard surfaces because they add colour without adding another pattern to argue with.

The powder-room half is the louder, stranger end of my painting, and that is on purpose. A room nobody lingers in is the one place a surprise pays off. There are perfume bottles painted as a pair, the Hello Gorgeous and Hello Beautiful letter prints, a blush leopard, a pink ocean pair, a Mediterranean sardine painting, and the head-of-flowers portraits where a woman's hair becomes a bouquet. Most of it would wear thin above a sofa. All of it is a good ninety seconds beside a guest basin.

Will a paper print survive a bathroom?

Yes, with one piece of care. Every print here ships unframed on heavy matte paper, and matte paper responds to humidity that keeps rising and falling — it can ripple slightly if it is pinned flat against a backing board in a room that steams twice a day. Framing behind glazing with a mat solves it, because the mat holds the paper off the glass and lets it move. Two placements to avoid: the wall the shower actually sprays, and the stretch directly above a bath where a splash lands. Anything else in the room is fine, and running the extractor fan during a shower does more for the print than the frame does.

What size fits above a toilet or beside a vanity?

These are the two smallest walls in the house and they want different answers. Above a toilet you are working to a tank roughly 50 cm (20 in) wide, so a single 11x14 in (28x36 cm) print, or a pair of 8x10 in (20x25 cm) stacked one above the other, fills it without crowding the cistern. Beside a vanity or between two mirrors the wall is usually taller than it is wide, which is where a set of two or three at 5x7 or 8x10 in a vertical run works better than one larger piece. The one size I would not reach for in a small bathroom is 16x20 in (41x51 cm) — it is a statement size and there is no viewing distance here to let it be seen properly.

Should the art match the towels?

Match the tile, not the towels. Towels change, and a print chosen to match a navy set looks stranded the day the navy ones wear out. Tile and paintwork are the things that stay, so I pick from those: warm cream or travertine tile takes the beige shells and the sage eucalyptus, white tile with chrome takes the navy and blue leaf sets and the blue seaweed, and a dark or heavily patterned floor is usually the cue to go quieter rather than louder overhead.

If you want more of a particular strand: the leaf sets continue in eucalyptus prints, the shells and seaweed in coastal wall art, and the sage and olive end in green wall art. Every design here comes in seven sizes, 5x7 up to 16x20 in (13x18 to 41x51 cm), printed to order and posted unframed.