Best Bathroom Layouts for Small Melbourne Homes: 7 Space-Saving Ideas

Melbourne's period cottages, Californian bungalows and inner-city apartments are full of character, but their bathrooms were rarely designed with modern fixtures in mind. A smart layout can make a 4–5sqm bathroom feel twice the size, while the wrong one wastes precious floor space on awkward door swings and dead corners. Here are seven layout strategies we use again and again on small Melbourne bathrooms.

1. Switch to a Sliding or Cavity Door

A standard hinged door needs almost a full square metre of clearance to swing open — space that's often the difference between a cramped bathroom and a comfortable one. Replacing it with a cavity slider (or, where the wall can't be altered, a sliding barn-style door) reclaims that footprint entirely and is one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost changes you can make.

2. Use a Corner or Shower-Over-Bath Combination

Fitting a separate shower and bath into a small room usually isn't realistic. A corner shower unit, or a shower-over-bath configuration with a fixed glass panel instead of a curtain, keeps both functions without the visual and physical bulk of two separate zones.

Good options for compact spaces

• Corner quadrant shower with a curved sliding door
• Shower-over-bath with a frameless glass screen
• Walk-in shower with a recessed niche instead of a caddy

3. Choose a Wall-Hung Vanity and Toilet

Wall-hung fixtures leave the floor visible underneath, which makes a small room read as larger and makes cleaning far easier. A wall-hung vanity with a single basin and slim cabinetry also opens up storage without a bulky floor-standing unit eating into walking space.

4. Go Large-Format on the Tiles

Counter-intuitively, bigger tiles make small rooms feel bigger, not smaller — fewer grout lines mean less visual clutter and a more continuous surface. Running the same large-format tile from floor to wall, or even into the shower recess, extends sightlines and removes the "boxed in" feeling common in older Melbourne bathrooms.

5. Build Storage Into the Wall, Not On It

A recessed wall niche in the shower and a mirrored cabinet above the vanity both provide real storage without protruding into the room. This is particularly valuable in weatherboard and brick-veneer homes where floor space is already tight and every extra shelf or freestanding cabinet becomes an obstacle.

Space-saving storage ideas

• Recessed shower niche instead of a hanging caddy
• Mirrored cabinet above the vanity instead of a plain mirror
• Slim vertical cabinetry beside the vanity rather than a separate freestanding unit

6. Centralise Plumbing Where Possible

Keeping the toilet, vanity and shower plumbing on or near the same wall reduces the pipework required and often the cost, but it also simplifies the layout by grouping "wet" fixtures together and freeing up the opposite wall for storage or clearer floor space — especially useful in the narrow, single-wall bathrooms common in Melbourne terraces.

7. Maximise Natural Light and Sightlines

Where a window exists, keep it unobstructed by cabinetry or shower screens wherever possible, and choose a lighter tile and wall palette to bounce available light around the room. In internal bathrooms with no window, a well-placed skylight or solar tube can make a genuine difference to how spacious the room feels, alongside layered lighting (ambient ceiling light plus a brighter vanity light).

Getting the Layout Right the First Time

The best small-bathroom layouts are the ones planned around how you actually use the space day to day, not just what fits on paper. A proper on-site measure — accounting for existing plumbing, doorways and structural walls — is what turns these ideas into a workable plan rather than a wish list.