Bathrooms are a stumbling point for even the surest decorators. The current "bathrooms are sanctuaries for relaxation, rejuvenation, and just being you!" party line has drawn many an otherwise sane person into unsounded depths of madness. Take, for example, this makeover from The Paris Apartment:

Before: A bathroom. Yup, it's a bathroom. Ain't nothin' but a bathroom. Came complete from Acme Bathrooms, Generic Apartment Bathroom #238. The only thing that keeps it from suffering desperately from grievous design flaws is that its soul is too weak and bland to experience anything as primal as suffering. Instead, it feels a vague ache of discontent for:

1. A terrifying amount of hospital white, accented with an unfinished blue paint job. The blue's not bad, but darling, please, finish what you start.
   
   
2. An ugly sink awkwardly placed in a dead-end nook left over after the tub was put in.
   
   
3. A painfully inadequate, hopelessly unaesthetic lightbar over the sink. The main overhead light is adequate, but stark.
   
   
4. A godawful suspended shower curtain bar. The shower curtain's pretty damn bad—it's got a Bauhaus industrial "machine for living" thing going on, or completely failing to go on, as the case may be—but I know from experience that a suspended bar of that kind is unlikely to be able to hold anything much more substantial.
   
   
5. Storage so badly located over the sink that you have to stand on the edge of the tub to reach it.

Making over this bathroom is easy. Damn near anything would be an improvement. The main obstacle is that because this is in a rented apartment, a full makeover isn't economical. The awkward layout, the generic fixtures, and the white tiles are going to have to stay.

To give the bathroom a new look, Claudia Strasser did this...