Southend is really three or four towns wearing one name. Stand on the clifftop at Westcliff and the houses behind you are Victorian and Edwardian — tall, bay-fronted, built when a bathroom was an afterthought squeezed onto the half-landing. Walk inland to Prittlewell and the streets settle into 1930s semis, compact and sensible, each with the same small bathroom over the hall. Head east along the seafront to Thorpe Bay and the plots widen into Edwardian and interwar houses on garden-suburb streets, with room for a proper ensuite. Carry on to Shoeburyness and you reach newer family homes where the plumbing is modern but the rooms were never chosen by the people living in them.
The clifftop houses ask the most of a design. Floor voids are shallow, the soil stack often runs down the outside wall, and a century of settling means nothing is quite square. None of that is a problem. It simply needs to be known while the room is still on paper, rather than found out when the tiler arrives, which is why we ask you for the measurements and a few photographs before we draw.
Prittlewell's semis are a different job. The bathroom is usually over the front door, with the waste running to a stack that fixes where the toilet can go. We plan the layout around that pipe first, then design the rest of the room to look as though it was always meant to be there.
Thorpe Bay and Shoeburyness are where we most often design two or three rooms together — a master ensuite, a family bathroom and a cloakroom sharing one palette so the house reads as a whole. Anything near the seafront also gets brassware and fixings chosen to shrug off salt air for a decade, not just to look right on day one.
We don't have a showroom in Southend town centre, and we don't pretend otherwise. What we have is a showroom at the Leigh end of the same city, around 3 miles along the road, where you can turn a tap on, stand inside a wetroom and see a tile under decent light. Come in when it suits you, tell us about your room, and we will do the rest. No brochure decides a bathroom the way an afternoon of handling the real thing does.
“Southend is three or four towns wearing one name — and each one needs its bathroom designed differently.”