Everyone loves a pleasant, luminous bathroom. In the morning, nothing brushes away the cobwebs of sleep from the brain like a bright, sunlit room. It’s a shining precursor to the day’s first cup of coffee. With this in mind, one time-honored Southern room-type makes a perfect model for the design of a bathroom – the sleeping porch. In historic Southern houses, the sleeping porch was traditionally located off a major bedroom and served as an escape from the oppressive heat of humid summer nights. These airy refuges were conventionally glazed by a band of operable windows. When the windows were all opened, the terrarium basically became a breezy cricket cage for sweaty, sleepy somnambulists. One functional problem arises, however, with transforming these little solariums into dressing rooms – the lack of wall space to hang vanity mirrors. One solution we’ve come up with is to actually hang or suspend a mirror in front of the window wall. With the abundance of light inherent in a design of this type, a little blockage is not a detriment and the “make-do” look adds to the retrofit feel of these rooms.  Thus, the traditional sleeping room becomes a “waking room”, perfectly set up for the secret exhibitionist that dwells in all of us.

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