What Bellevue and Other Eastside Homeowners Are Choosing
by the Design Team at Nip Tuck Remodeling · Bellevue, WA
The bathroom has gradually become one of the most meaningful rooms in the home. It is no longer just a functional space for intermittent use, but has instead become a place for daily rituals, a wellness environment, and a place that homeowners on the Eastside are investing in as a long-term asset.
The NKBA | KBIS 2026 Bath Trends Report, drawn from nearly 700 industry professionals, including designers, remodelers, architects, and manufacturers, confirms what our team has been seeing firsthand in primary bathroom remodels across Bellevue, Redmond, and Woodinville: The bar has risen, and homeowners know it.
Here’s what the best-designed bathrooms on the Eastside have in common right now, and why these choices hold up long after a renovation is complete.
The Primary Bath Is Getting More Personal
Seventy percent of industry professionals in the NKBA survey identified transitional and timeless designs as the dominant bath styles for the next three years. This pattern mirrors what we see in kitchens. Homeowners aren’t choosing between traditional warmth and contemporary clarity; they want both.
What makes this particularly relevant in primary bathrooms is how personal the design plans become. Unlike a kitchen, which serves the whole household, a primary bath is designed almost entirely around the people who use it every day. The materials, the layout, the lighting: All of it can be adjusted to a specific set of rituals. That’s where intentional design does its most important work.
The primary bathrooms we’re completing on the Eastside reflect that shift, with organic materials alongside clean profiles and layered lighting alongside generous storage. The spaces feel like they were built for a specific lifestyle because they were.
The Shower Is the Centerpiece
More than half of the design professionals surveyed by the NKBA agreed that enlarging the shower is now more important to homeowners than including a bathtub. That’s a significant shift, and it’s one we’ve been seeing play out in project after project across Bellevue and Redmond.
The shower in a well-designed primary bath isn’t just a functional enclosure. It’s the space within the space, the element that sets the tone for everything else. Homeowners are investing in rain heads, handheld fixtures, and secondary body sprays. They’re specifying frameless glass enclosures that open, rather than disrupt, the visual field. They’re asking for integrated niches, benches, and lighting that make the shower feel deliberate as well as practical. The best shower designs are both beautiful and built for real life.
Beautiful and Built for Life
A bench is no longer just a luxury; it’s a design detail that also serves aging-in-place needs. The NKBA report found that aging-in-place design elements have become so mainstream that 32% of designers now categorize them as a standard trend, not a specialty. Another 48% expect them to reach mainstream status within the next three years. Curbless showers, barrier-free entries, and integrated benches are no longer medical accommodations. These features are design choices.
The wet room format, where the shower and sometimes the soaking tub share a continuous floor plane, with no curb or threshold, is one of the most elegant expressions of this design. It’s inherently accessible, dramatically easier to clean, and creates a sense of spa-like openness that no curtain or shower door can replicate.
In one Woodinville primary bath, we carried large-format stone tile continuously from the main floor through the barrier-free shower entry, eliminating the visual break entirely. The result reads as one cohesive space — expansive, calm, and completely resolved. Heated floors extending from the main floor into the shower are a staple in this type of design and are one of the features homeowners tell us most often they wish they had done sooner.
Cleaner, Calmer, and More Practical
Large-format tile has become one of the most consistently requested specifications in the primary bathrooms we design across the Eastside, and the reasons are both aesthetic and practical. Fewer grout lines mean a cleaner visual plane, as the eye reads the surface as a continuous material rather than a grid. It also requires a fraction of the maintenance, since grout is where bathroom surfaces show age fastest.
From an investment standpoint, large-format tile is also more economical than full stone slabs while still achieving a similar sense of material weight and presence. A full shower surround in large-format porcelain with a stone-look finish delivers the warmth of natural stone at a fraction of the maintenance burden and none of the sealing requirements.
We’re specifying large-format tile in everything from floor-to-ceiling shower surrounds to continuous floor-to-wall transitions in wet rooms. The scale of the tile has a quieting effect on a space. And in a bathroom designed around wellness and daily ritual, that quality matters.
Making a Statement with Intention
While large-format neutrals dominate primary baths, the NKBA report revealed that patterned and textured tiles are gaining significant momentum, with 66% of industry professionals expecting them to increase in popularity. In our work, we find that texture and color work best when they’re given a single surface to own.
In one Woodinville guest bath, we specified a deep slate-blue ribbed tile, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, in the shower enclosure. The texture reads differently at every angle, and the depth of the color creates a sense of being immersed rather than simply enclosed. Matte black fixtures dissolve into the surface rather than compete with it. It’s a bold choice executed with restraint. Everything else in the bath is subdued, so the shower can take center stage.
Natural Materials in the Bath
The NKBA report points to organic and natural design as the second-fastest-growing bath style, with 65% of industry professionals expecting it to gain ground. On the Eastside, that aligns directly with what we’re specifying: natural wood vanity cabinetry, warm stone surfaces, and materials that feel honest rather than manufactured.
White oak and natural alder are the woods we’re working with most often. Their grain has warmth without heaviness, and they age gracefully in a humid environment when properly finished. Paired with the soft cream and warm white tones of quartz or quartzite countertops, the combination creates a bathroom that feels less like a utility room and more like a spa retreat.
The tactile quality of these materials matters in a space that’s experienced up close. A smooth quartz vanity surface, a warm wood drawer front, a textured stone accent wall: Each contributes to a sensory experience that a painted cabinet and laminate countertop simply can’t replicate.
Neutral Palettes and Earthy Greens Vie for Attention
The NKBA report observed that 96% of industry professionals identified neutrals as the dominant bathroom color palette, with off-white, light tan, and white leading the field. We are seeing similar preferences in the primary baths we’re designing, and our clients are appreciating the use of warm whites, soft creams, and light natural stone tones that create a sense of expansiveness and calm.
But earthy greens are also popular, with sage leading at 64% and olive at 43% in the NKBA survey. Homeowners are making considered choices about cabinet color instead of chasing trends. In one Woodinville primary bath, a seafoam-painted vanity with brushed brass hardware anchors a room that’s otherwise entirely neutral alongside large-format marble-look tile and white walls. The color is understated, it connects. The garden visible through the window reads almost as a continuation of the cabinetry tone, and that’s exactly the kind of deliberate design decision that makes a bathroom feel like it belongs to its specific place and homeowner.
Painted cabinetry in a soft, green hue ages differently than a trendy accent color. It deepens and settles into a space over time. Paired with brass, it has a warmth that neither chrome nor matte black can replicate in a light-filled bath.
Lighting as a Design Element
The NKBA report found that 91% of industry professionals cite lighting quality as a top priority in bath design, with 92% agreeing that task lighting must always be included in a primary bath. In practice, that means moving well beyond the single overhead fixture that most older Eastside homes were built with.
The vanity wall is where lighting decisions have the most visual impact. Side-mounted sconces flanking a mirror provide shadow-free task lighting that a bar fixture above the mirror simply cannot. When the mirror itself is oversized, spanning the full width of a double vanity, the sconce placement becomes an architectural element in its own right.
Beyond the vanity, we can layer in recessed ceiling lighting for ambient fill, shower-specific recessed fixtures for functional lighting inside the enclosure, and in some projects, night-time-specific lighting with low-level illumination that makes a midnight visit manageable without the jarring effect of full overhead lighting. Statement sconces in the powder room are one of the highest-impact, most cost-effective investments in any bathroom renovation.
Personality in the Powder Room and Beyond
The NKBA report highlights personalization as one of the core drivers of bath design decisions. Nowhere is that truer than in the powder room. Small in scale but high in visibility, a powder room is the one bathroom in the house that every guest experiences. It earns a level of design commitment that a primary bath, typically used only by the homeowners, sometimes does not. Wallpaper has returned with confidence and is a striking representation of that commitment.
Vinyl-backed wallpapers engineered for humid environments have made it a practical choice as well as an aesthetic one. Bold patterns, such as an oversized metallic botanical, a graphic damask, or a textured woven look, create rooms that feel intentionally curated rather than minimally decorated.
In one project, a warm tone-on-tone vinyl wallpaper covers the walls, complementing brass sconces, a natural wood vanity, and a quartzite counter. Brass fixtures against chrome accents reflect a growing comfort for combining finishes deliberately rather than matching everything to a single family. The result is a powder room that stops guests in their tracks. In a Medina home, bold, graphic wallpaper takes that same idea further with an oversized damask pattern that wraps the entire room and makes a powder room less of an afterthought and more of a deliberate escape for your guests.
Wellness Features
Seventy-seven percent of NKBA survey respondents expect that aligning bath design to a hotel or resort experience will become standard practice, and steam showers, heated floors, and integrated wellness features, such as bidets, are a physical expression of that shift.
Steam showers are among the most frequently requested features in primary bath consultations on the Eastside. A steam generator adds modest investment to a shower that’s already being tiled and plumbed, but the return in terms of daily use is significant. Together, steam heat, aromatherapy options, and chromotherapy lighting create a recovery and relaxation experience that has historically required a spa membership.
Heated floors are no longer a luxury specification in the bathrooms we design; they’re a baseline expectation. The technology has matured, the investment is modest relative to the floor tile work already underway, and the daily experience of stepping onto a warm floor on a winter morning is one of those details homeowners never stop appreciating. Extending the heated floor continuously into a curbless shower, as we do in wet room designs, adds an additional layer of cohesion that elevates the entire space.
Bidet seats and integrated bidet toilets have become mainstream in the Eastside market. Both projects shown in this article featuring barrier-free design include bidet toilets, not as a novelty, but as a considered wellness and hygiene feature that homeowners increasingly expect in a primary bath investment at this level.
A Space Built Around How You Actually Live
The primary bathrooms we’re most proud of aren’t those with the most features but are instead the ones where every decision can be traced back to the same question: How does this family want to feel in this space at the start of each day?
The choices that endure, like the wet room that’s also barrier-free, the heated floor that extends into the shower, the natural wood that warms the whole room, and the wallpaper that makes the powder room memorable, are the ones made with that question answered first.
If you’re beginning to think about a primary bathroom remodel in Bellevue, Redmond, or Woodinville, we’d love to start that conversation.
Source
Statistics cited throughout this article are drawn from the NKBA | KBIS 2026 Bath Trends Report, released November 11, 2025. The report is based on a survey of nearly 700 industry professionals, including designers, remodelers, architects, manufacturers, and showroom specialists across North America. The full report is available to NKBA members at NKBA.org. Public press release: nkba.org/press/nkba-kbis-releases-annual-2026-bath-trends-report/
