The Dark Arts of DIY: A bathroom to want to get naked in

She’s always been obsessed with black. Her wardrobe is half bright colours and half black. Her cats are her half mottled and the others, they’re all black.

When she bought the house we’re currently living in, it was the black ceiling with gold cornice that enchanted her heart.

 

So, when she told me, she wanted a black bathroom, after years of dull cream monotony, I went with it. It was a big enough space, with lovely natural light – it could probably handle some drama.

This isn’t a renovation post. I’m not going to tell you how to get these effects and which colours we used.

Its sole purpose is to show you, that sometimes the extreme darkness of life can bring to the fore the most subtle, brilliant light.

 

When an individual has a strong intuitive impulse for something they feel called to bring to creation – even if it sounds wildly unorthodox to those steering their boats on the rivers of convention – then it’s probably the one significant change that will bring this individual great amounts of happiness. How it does this, is irrelevant to anyone but that individual. That it will, is what matters.

For my mother, the lover of nature’s deepest darkest pigment, a black bathroom was the beginning of reclaiming her power.

It was the strange transformation that unlocked a magical sequence of healing for her, after facing everything she’d gone through in this often, brutally unkind life.

If her previous cream bathroom told the story of being robbed and left denuded, then this black bathroom was the embodiment of shedding the baggage and willingly standing naked in one’s truth.

To you, it may just be a bathroom make-over, but to me this black bathroom is the end to the chapter of a once bitten, beautiful woman and her twice shy, shaken soul.

It’s her giving credence to the coal caked on her diamonds and instead making that coal into something magical.

Sometimes, the best therapy we can offer ourselves is to listen to the seemingly random impulses drumming in our hearts, trusting that they will usher in what’s needed, and, in this case, as the Stones put it – Paint it Black.