British bathrooms spent about 30 years looking the same. Tiles, suite, walls, paint: everything was white, because colour had burned the previous generation so badly that nobody wanted to risk it again. Once the avocado and peach fittings of the 70s and 80s became a punchline, homeowners ran in the other direction and gutted every last trace of personality from the room. But that has changed.
Bold greens, deep blues, warm pinks and earthy tones now dominate showrooms and renovation projects from Cornwall to Aberdeen, and more people will commit to a colourful bathroom this year than in the last two decades combined. What pushed them to finally move on from white, and how can you pull off a colourful bathroom without creating the next design disaster?
Why Britain Went White in the First Place
Nobody just stopped liking avocado bathrooms. They became a genuine obstacle when it came time to sell a house, with estate agents through the 90s and 2000s regularly telling homeowners to rip out coloured sanitaryware before putting a property on the market. “Avocado bathroom” turned into code for a house that time forgot. White was the safe bet because it looked clean and matched everything, which was really all you needed to keep buyers happy.
That caution stuck around for years. Kitchens got bolder over time, with coloured cabinetry and statement splashbacks, but bathrooms didn’t budge at all. The reasoning never changed: bathrooms cost a lot to refit, so you don’t gamble on anything that might date badly.
What Finally Broke the All-White Rule
A few things happened at roughly the same time. Covid lockdowns meant people were stuck at home, and suddenly the bathroom wasn’t just somewhere to shower and brush your teeth. It became a space you might actually want to spend time in, and once that happened, expectations about what a bathroom should look like went up.
On top of that, products like peel-and-stick tiles, coloured grout, removable wall coverings and paint effects made experimenting much cheaper and far less permanent. A full retile was no longer necessary just to try a colour out. Social media did the rest, with Pinterest and Instagram turning bold bathrooms into something people aspired to instead of avoided, and a forest green shower wall or a terracotta accent went from risky to desirable almost overnight.
How to Add Colour Without Regretting It
The smart move is to keep permanent fixtures neutral and bring colour in through things you can swap out later. Walls are the obvious starting point, and luckily, adding colour to a bathroom today doesn’t have to mean sacrificing hygiene. These days, you can pick up sanitary PVC wall cladding in colours like apricot, lavender, olive, avocado, sunflower, duck egg and much more so there’s no reason a wet room can’t have real character while still being easy to clean.
Floors work well too. Patterned vinyl or encaustic-look porcelain tiles will bring warmth into the room without touching the suite at all, and smaller details like coloured towel rails, brass or matte black hardware, tinted mirrors and even a painted ceiling can make a surprising difference to how a bathroom looks overall.
Pick one or two confident colours instead of throwing five at the wall. A deep green feature wall paired with brass fittings and natural wood shelving will age far better than a room that tries to cram in every trend at once.
Bathrooms With a Character Are Back
The all-white bathroom had its moment. It was a response to years of dodgy colour choices, and for a while it made total sense. But interiors move in cycles, and we’ve hit the point where white-on-white looks more like a missed opportunity than a deliberate decision.
What’s different this time is that the materials are better and more affordable, and they come in colours that go well beyond avocado and peach. If your bathroom still looks like a carbon copy of every other one on the street, this could be the year to finally do something about it.
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