Compatibility Test (April 15, 2012)
Since late last winter, we’ve paid several calls on F.W. Webb bathroom showroom in Gloucester. After visiting half a dozen similar places and leaving reluctant to dump so much dosh on toiletry, we walked into F.W. Webb;spotted a tub, commode, and pedestal sink we actually loved (Best-Laid Pipe Part I: The Master Bath); and received exceptionally knowledgeable and good-humored assistance from a woman named Diane Hyland.
Even here, however, accessories were a challenge. If we were marriage counselors, we’d plant our office next to a bathroom showroom. Half the couples in these stores end up bickering before they leave, and we were no exception. It took us three visits and several simmer-level spats to settle on all the detailed fine points for our master bath—namely the spigots, faucets, toilet bowl lever, and lighting. The number of options is overwhelming, the goods are pricey, and just because a product is sold in MA doesn’t mean it’s approved for use in state-owned buildings like ours. We had to schlep back to the starting block at least once after we’d agreed on accessories, only to learn our favorite bathtub faucetry, which dictated our other selections, wasn’t authorized for use in a state-owned building in MA.
Somehow, without irreversible wear on our marital bond, we managed to find compatible porcelain and chrome faucet handles for the sink and the tub, and a toilet handle that played equally well with the others—all united, to our eye, by the porcelain and that little knob on the chrome.
We were downright telepathic when it came to picking out these wall sconces: Hundreds of lighting options are on display at Wolfer’s, outside Boston in Waltham. We agreed to wander through the options solo and meet up afterward to compare notes, and discovered we shared the same #1 favorite. We’ll buy five for our master bath.
I’d always thought we’d scavenge for unique, mismatched porcelain, hardware, and antique lighting fixtures from architectural salvage yards or eBay; through the years, they’ve tempted me to buy them as objects just because I found them beautiful, if useless to me then. We spotted this stunning birdbath of a pedestal sink, for example, at Restoration Resources in Boston the weekend before we bought our new sink for the master bath. It seemed like the perfect outsized-but-graceful complement to our pedestal tub-for-two. But it would have taken an implausibly happy accident to find matching antique hardware that fit and met code on a state-owned building.
It hurt at first to see perfectly nice used bathroom faucets like these for $30 from Boston Building Resources, when we were poised to drop hundreds to buy them new. Now I know to snap a photo, post it on our website, and leave it at that—at least until it’s time to scavenge for antique, state code-immune furniture.