A bathroom has to have storage, work surfaces, multiple plumbing fixtures, a variety of lighting…and it all has to look beautiful. PLUS it has house all of that in a space with fluctuating levels of humidity and temperature changes.
Today I’m pulling back the curtain on how to create a comfortable, healthy, code compliant bathroom without sacrificing the character of your mid-century home.
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Our techno-optimist “modern” mid-century ancestors often embraced technology at the expense of nature. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from studying homes across the USA: relying solely on mechanical systems to replace natural light and air is a design mistake.
Mid-century homes were built at a time when most homes still relied on natural ventilation. Pretty much every mid-century home had a furnace but still didn’t have a cooling system. These homes relied on air flow to address heat and humidity. Windows were placed to create cross breezes and code required bathroom to have an operable window.
Code updates have made it possible to build a bathroom that relies completely on mechanical ventilation. In a modern remodel, contractors often advise homeowners to ditch the window in the shower or to swap operable glass for glass block because it’s “easier.”
Here’s why. When it comes to mechanical ventilation requirements, there is one goal: remove the humidity. The health of your building is the primary reason to vent. Smells are secondary to the code…but I know they may not be to you!
My advice? Push back.
While it’s technically legal to forego a window in a bathroom, I don’t agree that it’s advisable. Preserving an operable window (even in a shower) is preferable and entirely possible with the right design and drainage.
Designing our houses so that they can still be thoroughly vented with fresh air is both energy efficient and more pleasant. An operable window is clear a space quicker than a mechanical fan and it works even if (when) the power is out for any reason. It’s one less potential failure point in a high maintenance room.
And we humans need and prefer fresh air and natural light. A window is simply a more pleasing solution.
Added bonus? It’s a way quickly handle off gassing of unnatural materials that often find their way into our homes through products and sometimes through building materials at the time of remodel.
You will want a mechanical fan in addition to your window, so here are a few quick tips for your remodel:
- Keep it separate. Don’t be seduced by fancy “all-in-one” fan/light/Bluetooth speaker combos. Each device should be placed in its ideal location. A speaker doesn’t belong in the shower, and a light centered in the room isn’t necessarily the best spot for your fan.
- The path matters. The duct run from your fan to the outside should be as short and straight as possible. Every right angle reduces efficiency.
- Don’t dump it in the attic. Never, ever exhaust your bathroom directly into the attic. That humidity needs to go all the way outside.
That first tip leads me to light. Light in a bathroom should be layered – natural light from a window, a nightlight, accent lighting to highlight features, targeted task lighting, plus bright general lighting. This may seem like a lot of lighting for such a small space. Good news! You don’t need an infinite budget to get this right. You just need a plan.
If you’re dealing with a landlocked space that has lost its exterior wall due to additions, consider clerestory windows to steal natural light from adjacent rooms. Never give up access to natural light if you can help it.
You may be able to add both safety and accent lighting in one go. Choose a low-intensity, always-on light for middle-of-the-night trips that can be mounted under a cabinet and can serve both a safety and aesthetic purpose.
Task lighting is, ideally, light shining on your face from two angles to avoid harsh overhead shadows. Think getting ready lighting. Sconces or pendants work well for this type of lighting and to add style
And you need some “bright light” for cleaning…or searching for a dropped contact lens.
Mid Mod Midwest Resources
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
So your bathroom is a small place with a lot of different needs jammed in. It needs to have the basic plumbing fixtures, you know, the point of going in there. It needs storage for a whole host of different things, from pill bottles to bath sheets. It needs surfaces to lay out cosmetics, bandages, and your drinking glass, and needs to look pretty on every surface. But it also needs to be well lit and well ventilated.
So today we’re going to talk about how to make that happen and how the light and vent needs of bathrooms have changed over time, which affects which ideas are baked into your existing mid-century bath and what you might need to account for in a remodel. Hey there. Welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2506.
Before I get started with that, I will just take one moment to say that if you’ve been thinking about reaching out to Mid Mod Midwest to create a mid-century master plan for your home, and you’d like that design process completed this calendar year, then now is pretty much your last available moment to make that happen.
We are very booked out through this spring and summer, and we are planning that our next signed project will probably kick off in mid-October and may not be complete with our process and time for your feedback before the end of the year. If everything goes to plan, it could, but the timing is getting snug now. So now is the right time to reach out and have an easy starter conversation.
If you’re curious about what it might be like to work with Mid Mod Midwest, we’ve got information about that process, client testimonials, an explainer video by me, all on the website, and the form to reach out and schedule a 30-minute chat with me about your house and what you’ve got planned for it. So you can find all of that on my website at midmodest.com slash services to get started. Or you can find that and all the links to other resources I might mention in today’s episode at the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com/2506.
Okay. So I have talked before about light and ventilation uh as a component of mid-century homes. I think most recently this came up in an episode that was dedicated to skylights and light tubes. What specifically episode was that? Uh that would have been 1709 from summer of 2024.
But this is an issue that comes up regularly when I’m planning remodels, when I’m reviewing existing mid-century homes, particularly early mid-century homes, homes from the late 40s or mid-to-early 50s, early to mid-50s, I suppose. You will likely not find a lot of mechanical ventilation. You won’t necessarily find a vent hood over the stove in an original mid-century kitchen, and you will likely not find an exhaust vent in the bathroom. Now you will find artificial light in a bathroom and artificial light in the kitchen, but you might not find a lot.
The sort of standard builder basic bathroom from the early to mid-50s, again, if it’s never been remodeled up until this time, probably has just one light in the bathroom over the sink, centered on the mirror, centered on the sink, that is the sole source of artificial light for the space. It will, however, have natural light and vent. At the time of early mid-century construction, certainly, the building code would have required natural light and vent. It may have had a provision for substituting artificial ventilation and light, but people would also have felt most comfortable in a mid-century home that had an operable window in the bathroom.
This is still absolutely my recommended practice today, but the situation has gotten a little more complicated and we can get a lot fancier with how we add light to mid-century bathrooms. And particularly, we should expect in a remodel to add mechanical ventilation to mid-century bathrooms when and wherever we can. We always can inner remodel. We can always add a vent fan, and we should. Sometimes we need to add more than one.
And I’ll talk about some of those specifics in a minute. But of course, hey, it’s me, your friendly neighborhood, history-loving mid-century architect. So I want to talk a little bit about the context and how we got here. Because as the mid-century falls within the sort of middle of the 20th century, it before that was an era when all light and ventilation was natural. Through the modernist period, which begins in the late teens and early 20s of the 1900 years, there was a move towards mechanical ventilation. So the larger modernist buildings that were happening, the big high-rises with glass exterior walls known as curtain walls, they were starting to depend not on operable windows and air shafts for their air circulation, but on entirely mechanical forced air ventilation systems. And they would have new codes permitting bathrooms being inside, away from the exterior walls, not a pretty part of the facade.
So that was starting to come into mode long before the mid-century houses were being built, but that wasn’t as necessarily common in the residential scale. Still, mid-century modern has modern in the word, partly because the idea was trying to lean into some of these modernist ideals, not, in my opinion, always successfully. I think we in America particularly leaned a little bit too hard into the idea that we could dismiss natural light and natural ventilation, that we could always depend on energy, on pouring electricity or gas into buildings in order to solve our problems.
And while I am by no means an expert on European or Canadian mid-century designs, I will say that when I have traveled in Europe and in Canada, I noticed that buildings right up into today are typically constructed with operable windows, even in a glass-fronted high-rise building. You’ll see that the facade is a little, it’s actually, it can look kind of messy to an architect’s eye, to someone who’s used to a sleek glass-fronted American building.
But when I look at all those individual owners or office workers opening their glass windows to get a little bit of fresh air, I don’t see it as messy. I see it as beautiful. They are taking advantage of fresh air. So I want to kind of caveat this whole episode when I’m talking a lot about how to add artificial lighting to a bathroom and how to properly mechanically vent a bathroom, that I don’t think we should give up on the ability to just always open a window.
To orient a window, if possible, if we’re locating a bathroom, if we have a chance to drop in a skylight, to bring daylight into an otherwise dark side of the house, a place that’s shaded by trees. I want us to start with natural light and natural event and then supplement it with mechanical systems.
That might seem obvious. It might seem like, well, of course, if you’re just thinking about it off the top of your head, you have a window in the bathroom, why would you ever get rid of it? But a fairly common layout for a mid-century bathroom is to have a sort of a long arrangement where you enter at the short side and the other short side has the tub spread across it. And for people who want to transform what had been a tub shower into, for example, a steam shower, you might be advised by your contractor that it would just be simpler to cover over that window, not have to worry about having a window in the shower.
Everything will be easier if we just got rid of that space or certainly just made a glass block with no uh no ability to operate it. And it’ll be more worry-free and don’t worry, we can fix that with better can lights, for example. And I think if you have listened to the podcast at all, you know that when I say we can fix that problem with can lights, I am saying that’s a really short-sighted answer that I don’t agree with. So I kind of just want to over-emphasize the importance of preserving the ability to bring daylight into a space.
If you’re going to lose view, daylight, and ventable daylight, then I want you to bring in a light tube so you’ve got some kind of natural light coming from the sky. But specifically, I want you to push back on the idea that you need to give up an operable window in the bathroom, even if it happens in the shower. I have lived in many bathrooms that have a window in the shower, and with proper maintenance and proper design and a well-drained sill, they are not a problem. So please don’t let your contractor ever tell you that that’s not possible.
Push back on that theory. Another reason that windows in bathrooms can vanish is that houses get extended. So perhaps what once was an exterior wall becomes part of a screened-in porch that then turns into a three-season room, that then turns into an insulated living room. These things can happen. But I’m also, if you have to lose how do I want to put this? If you have to give up the ability to open a window and vent out a bathroom, still don’t give up the daylight.
It’s perfectly plausible to let light travel from one part of a house to another through a non-operable window. And creating interior clear story windows where you’ve got basically not the kind of window you could see through. You wouldn’t want to look from a newly remodeled former screen porch three-season room living room into a bathroom, but you could share light between those spaces. And particularly if it’s up above head height, so you might make that window a little higher in the wall, so you’re never gonna see the silhouette of anyone using the bathroom.
I would still encourage you to consider keeping some functionality of windows, some ability to have daylight coming into every bathroom space, even if it’s starting to become landlocked. We’re living in times when it is often unpleasant to fully vent your house with outside air. It’s too hot outside, it’s too humid outside, but there are always gonna be swing seasons, no matter where you are regionally, there are always gonna be times when it’s nice to just take advantage of a breeze, of morning cool air, even on a day that’s gonna get warmer.
And designing our houses so that they can still be thoroughly vented with fresh air is not only energy efficient and pleasant, but it’s a way to push back on the off gassing of unnatural materials that often find their way into our homes through products and sometimes through building materials at the time of remodel.
So hold on to your natural ventilation with both hands as much as you possibly can. So we’ve clearly established you need to make daylight and also the ability to open, not just have, a window and let fresh air pass through a room a priority in your bathroom.
Let’s talk about some design philosophies for mechanical ventilation and artificial light in your bathrooms. Now, the internet can provide us with nearly infinite examples of aesthetic layouts for lighting, but I want to talk about what underlies that in each of these two categories, and I’m actually gonna start with vent. Depending on your contractor, the specifics of the mechanical ventilation in your bathroom may or may not even come up. They might just pop in a vent fan, and that’s not the worst thing in the world, as long as you’ve got one. But here are a few questions they might want to ask you, or you might want to ask them before that installation happens.
First, you’re gonna focus on the capacity of the specific fan unit. You want to make sure that the fan you’re purchasing is rated for the volume of space in your bathroom and also that it can work relatively quickly. This might be rated by air changes per hour.
But the most air changes per hour might not be your top priority. It might be more important to you that you have a fan that does this work in a whisper quiet way, even if it does that by producing slightly fewer air changes per hour and simply venting the space out more slowly. That’s okay. We use mechanical ventilation in bathrooms for two reasons. One, to remove smells from bathrooms, and two, to remove humidity from bathrooms.
Now, smells are an important factor, I’ll grant, but the building safety and maintenance reason that we’re focusing on these is to remove humidity from the bathroom. And it’s okay if that doesn’t happen immediately. A little bit of condensation on surfaces is allowed. It just needs to happen overall for the lifetime health of your building.
Another factor that’s going to come up when you’re sizing and specking the vent fan is what happens to the air after it leaves your bathroom. How large and how long is the duct that will take the air from your bathroom to outside and how many bends does it have? Every time there’s a right angle change, it requires a little bit more energy to move that air. Ideally, the duct run from your exhaust fan is short and straight, and any changes to that may require a more powerful fan to keep the air moving all the way to the outsides of the space.
By the way, a bathroom vent fan should not exhaust directly into your attic. This is something you may find in an older home in a DIY installed unit or in an early mid-century prototype fan. You don’t want bathroom humidity in your attic any more than you want it in your bathroom. It needs to go outside the envelope of the house. So let’s talk about where inside the bath volume an exhaust fan should go.
Basically, you want it as close as possible to the source of the humidity and or the smell. If your toilet is located in its own little chamber, then you might want to go ahead and get it its own little bath exhaust fan. Otherwise, I prefer to locate the vent fan in the shower area. That’s where you’re going to get the maximum humidity.
And like I say, it will draw air out of the bathroom to solve smell issues, but most primarily we are concerned with humidity. This leads me to a question I get asked a lot, which is shouldn’t I put the exhaust fan centered in the room? Because it might have a light in it, and then it would be a centered light and fan. And my answer to that is don’t get a vent fan that is also a light. It won’t be as good a van or as good a light.
Yeah, sometimes people, even if they’re going to put it in the shower, they’re like, well, I want a light in the shower, so I might as well go ahead and put the light in the exhaust fan, and then I’ve got one thing in the shower ceiling. I find this to be flawed logic.
Interestingly, I popped over to Consumer Reports to check out the latest recommendations for effective, quiet fan units, and that is still a good place to look. But I did note that they were um increasing their recommendations based on what I think of as sort of unnecessarily boring bordering on silly things like technology that’s gonna go out of date. Bundling a fan with a light, sure, but also bundling a fan with a Bluetooth speaker.
The ideal place for a fan is not the ideal place for a light, and it’s certainly not the ideal place for a speaker. Now, like, look, sure, do you want to have a Bluetooth speaker in your bathroom? Do you want to have a surround sound system in your bathroom? Please feel free, knock yourself out. But absolutely do not pair them.
The last thing you want is for a perfectly functional fan unit to be rendered out of date by Bluetooth technology changing, um or even just breaking down for one piece to break and the other functionality still to be working, and then you’ve got to go in and do a whole replacement project. This is silly. They should be separate devices. Um and I just yeah, I don’t have more philosophy or theory around that. I just think each device, each fixture in your bathroom, the vent, the light, the Bluetooth speaker should be separate and should be placed in the ideal locations for itself.
The other thing you might think about is the aesthetic of a bath exhaust fan, and sure. Um you might feel like an exhaust vent is not, is inherently not an aesthetic object, and you’re probably right. So my answer is just kind of ignore it. It’s probably white. So is your ceiling. Just don’t look at it that much. Is this me pulling my Frank Lloyd Wright moment and just saying plant vines? I don’t know.
But you can also dress up the cover of your exhaust fan. You’re not required to use the little plastic cover that comes with the mechanical unit housing. I absolutely recommend you buy a professionally manufactured uh vent unit, the fan itself. But the cover, you could get something custom-made. You could also find something vintage. I’m gonna point you back towards my recent conversation this season with Colin and Dana of unflipping about their bathroom remodel. They were sharing all the great details of their recent bathroom update. And in particular, they used a vintage kitchen fan cover in shiny chrome and retrofit it over the casing of a modern vent fan for a vintage look with modern guts.
It is so cute. And it’s a perfect example of how you could get creative with a cover on your vent fan, even as well as it works. Um, even as it works, just, you know, sort of in a mundane way to suck moist air out of the bathroom. So ultimately, what you’re looking for in an exhaust vent fan is quiet and functional. Um, you want to set up the shortest possible duct run to get the air out of your house, out of the attic, and you do not need to mix and match with fancy other features.
Let’s talk about lighting. In lighting in bathrooms, um, it’s very similar to the way I think about lighting in kitchens or lighting’s in the entire right of the house, there are several general categories. There is the general or ambient lighting, there is the task lighting, and there is the accent lighting. Um, there’s a fourth type that comes up in bathrooms, which I would call safety lighting. But let’s go through in order.
First, I should note that in a small, particularly in a small simple bathroom, a bathroom that’s just basically one rectangular volume of space, rectangular prism of space without a lot of extra bits, you could use one single light source to do all of these tasks, as long as it has a dimmer and the room itself is relatively light colored. Or you could use just a few.
These can definitely multitask, but you want a general light source, at least one, which can brightly light the major volume of space. If you’ve got a niche for your shower, or if you’ve got a separate little room for your toilet, each of those sort of separated from the main volume of space areas needs its own general light, should be able to be turned up bright for cleaning after dark, and also should be turned down dim for not getting in your way when you don’t want a lot out of it. It’s fairly straightforward. This might be a ceiling light.
If you want to go ahead and put in can lights or allow your electrician to put in can lights, you can, particularly the shower area. They should be responsible for noting that they are humidity-proof uh shower-rated units, but other than that, it doesn’t really make much of a difference. Um, but you could also probably get the general lighting you need from sconce or pendant lights that s that flank the mirror as well. For task lighting, you basically want light to shine on your face when you stand at the vanity.
Um you want Yeah, that’s basically it. You want evenly spaced light that’s going to shine. I’m in my preference, not straight down on you to make a shadow of your nose on your mouth, but from two directions on evenly sort of angled parts of your face as you stand at a vanity mirror. This might happen a bunch of different ways in a very small bathroom.
I often like to make that happen by suspending a pendant from the ceiling so it has doesn’t have to take up mirror space, uh, but you can also mount a light right through the mirror. Mirrors can have a hole drilled in them, and then you can wire the light through so it is getting reflected light bouncing. Um, and this is just another reminder that light travels, especially in a small space.
You can magnify light by using mirrors to reflect it, and you can allow it to multitask. We also want to think about accent lighting in a bathroom. Accent lighting throws light onto a pretty object or surface to highlight its shape or materiality or other features. It doesn’t necessarily provide general light for the room or task lighting, but again, it can multitask.
So, for example, if you put a strip of light underneath your bath vanity, either at the baseboard where the vanity rests on the ground, or if the vanity itself is floating, you can just run it underneath. That can serve both as a low general light, a task light, if you think about it from a safety perspective as you move in the space in the dark, and an accent highlighting a well-chosen flooring material and shining it up.
Um basically anytime you can let a light do double duty, you can. So if you’re looking for the various places you might put a light in a bathroom, you might put a light on the ceiling, you certainly might put a light on the ceiling in the shower or in a bath chamber, a toilet chamber. Um you will probably put light either on the walls on either side of the mirror or suspended from the ceiling near a mirror.
And you might definitely want to think about an under light that lights your evening pathway that doesn’t shine up into your eyes. This does double duty as the fourth type of lighting I mentioned, a safety light. This would be an always-on light for evenings or a motion-censored or a night light to light your way for popping into the room with your hands are full. I’m a big fan of having a very low intensity always-on light in a bathroom, particularly a primary bathroom, particularly a bathroom that is used by adults taking care of pets or kids, um, or any person with any kind of visual impairment for their own use in the middle of the night.
If you are getting up to help a kid be sick or to check on a sick pet, the last thing you want to be doing is fumbling around for light switches. You want to be able to know where you’re going and grab for the sort of emergency resource that you need as you get them. From an aesthetic perspective, I will point you to Pinterest. Um, I’ll put a link in the show notes page to my personal Mid Mod Midwest uh Pinterest board of bath update ideas, to Instagram, to the portfolio pages of my website.
We’ve got a bunch of different examples of pretty lighting solutions for small, medium, and large bathrooms. But more generally than that, I want you to think about what you’d like the light in your bathroom to do, and the vent. What you want the vent to do is get moist or smelly air out of the bathroom, but what you want light to do in the space, not just how you want the light to look.
So before you go hunting down your Waver Fairy favorite pretty light fixtures on all modern or um vintage sources, even better, think about what tasks you’re trying to get your light to accomplish. General task lighting, accent lighting, or safety lighting, or some combination of more than one of those four. So that’s about it.
If you’re getting into the weeds on things like the mechanical venting of your bathroom or the proper placing of bathroom light fixtures, then you should absolutely already have your hands on my free guide to bath updates. Go to midmod-bidwest.com slash bath to get the free guide.
And actually, it’s uh we’ve updated that page. So it’s got a compilation of a whole bunch of different resources. Um, case study examples on bathrooms I’ve designed, a podcast episode on the basics, a free workbook to walk you through the qualities of a good bathroom from storage to surface area to lighting and to materiality. And then also it’s an easy place to go ahead and grab access to my two-hour-long workshop on bed and bath design called the Owner Suite Clinic, but it’s going to be useful for anyone designing any kind of a bath update whatsoever.
This is incredibly effective, detailed advice if all you’re planning to change in your house is the bathroom or bathrooms. Um, but also, we’re delighted to talk to you about specifics of your individual bathroom remodel. I can talk to you about that one-on-one in one of my 30-minute design calls, or we can include the bath design update in a larger mid-century master plan.
One way or another, it’s so relatively easy these days to just call a contractor who, quote, does unquote baths and have every surface and fixture in your bathroom replaced with low-cost but fresh new items. That kind of Home Depot special remodel doesn’t even last well mechanically very well but certainly does not last well aesthetically. But you don’t have to go to very expensive high-end finishes to get a great timeless or more time-free bath update planned.
You just need to think about it properly and make a few substitutions, one material for another, one tile for another, one type of sink or vanity unit for another, and think a little bit more along the lines of mid-century design. If you’re excited to do that, I’m excited to help you make it happen.
And next time I’ll be back to talk about the general principles of a good mid-century bathroom update. For now, though, if you want to check on any of the links or references, I’ve made in this episode, go ahead to the show notes page at midmodus.com slash 2506. And I’ll be back next week with more on mid-century bathrooms to round out this season. See you then.