The bathroom is the new design frontier. In urban apartments and at large secluded estates, adventurous home owners and the nation's top designers are breaking the old rules, using space and materials in dramatic new ways and reimagining just what a bathroom can be. No longer intended solely for utilitarian purposes, today's bathrooms are designed for everything from solitude to accommodating the family to entertaining. "The Luxury Bathroom" offers a tour of thirty-five state-of-the-art spaces created by today's top designers--among them Celerie Kemble, Jamie Drake, and Miles Redd--in exclusive residences across the country. From luxuriously equipped expanses worthy of Canyon Ranch to a tiny Beaux Arts bathroom inspired by a gallery at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to a guest bath covered in leather tiles, each room is unique and a rich source of inspiration and aspiration. Once the most purely functional of rooms, bathrooms today are evolving into the most fanciful and sumptuous of living spaces. In these pages you'll discover a getaway oasis that brings the spa vacation home, an unabashedly social space complete with wet bar and fabulous upholstery, and a woman's private sanctuary that is the ultimate expression of contemporary femininity. Not only delving into the details that make each room unique, but also including humor and insight into how the spaces reflect the owners' lifestyle, taste, and vision, "The Luxury Bathroom" reveals a surprising range of possibilities for reinventing this room, for those of us who are ready to begin now or who are just dreaming about doing so. The phenomenal array of unique materials and the limitless imagination of designers and builders have made bathrooms the new design frontier. The space has become a nucleus of style and taste, but perhaps it is most notable for seducing its owners to spend time there. And, after all, what is more luxurious than time? With the endless possibilities for what was once a boxed-in space, the bathroom has become the Cinderella star of a fancy dress ball. And so "The Luxury Bathroom" will inform and entertain as it celebrates not just the bathroom, but really the imagination.

Author Biography

SAMANTHA NESTOR is the special projects editor at "Metropolitan Home" magazine. Previously she was the director of marketing and communications at the New York Design Center and also worked at the Frick Collection and the New York Public Library. She lives in Darien, Connecticut, with her husband and son.