The brief
A top-floor bathroom in a Battersea townhouse, tucked under the pitch of the roof and reworked as one calm, continuous space. The owners wanted the walls, the floor and the shelving built into the slope beside the shower to read as a single material - no tiles, no grout, no skirting lines and no change of surface where the shelving meets the wall.
That is exactly the job microcement was engineered for. At two to three millimetres thick it follows every plane without adding build-up, it wraps a sculpted niche as readily as a flat wall and once sealed it is one washable surface from the shower tray up.
What we did
We colour-matched a warm putty tone across two microcement grades: a mesh-reinforced floor grade with the compressive strength to take daily traffic and a wall grade that trowels finer for the walls, the shower and the shelving. Same pigment, same sealer - two specifications tuned to what each surface has to do.
The shower was tanked first and the shelving formed in board and mesh, so the microcement could be applied as one continuous skin over the niche, across the shower wall and out into the room in a single pass. Every internal corner was coved rather than mitred, which is what makes the material look poured rather than applied. A black-framed fixed screen and a wall-hung oak vanity were the only other elements, so the finish does the talking.
Site sequencing mattered: shelving and shower first, walls second, floor last - so nothing finished was walked over before it was sealed.
The detail
- Putty-toned microcement matched from a physical sample, signed off in the room's own light.
- Tanked shower with the finish carried over the sculpted shelving, the walls and the floor with no joints.
- Two grades of the same system, one continuous colour, white ceiling.
- Sealed for a family bathroom: wipe-clean, water-resistant, repairable by hand.
The result
With the fixtures in, the room already shows what the owners asked us for: floor, walls and shower shelving in one material, with no grout to scrub and no joints to collect water. The screen keeps the shower open to the room so the surface reads as one piece from the door to the window, and the oak vanity and black fittings sit against it without competing. Sealed and rated for wear, the floor will take a family's traffic and clean with a mop, and because the finish is hand-applied it is repaired by hand rather than replaced. Final photography follows at handover.
