These farmhouse bathroom decorating ideas Feel Authentic

Whenever I enter someone’s home and feel like they truly live in a ‘real’ farmhouse I start envisioning converting my bathroom. Nothing pretentious or overly stylised, just an honest, homely bathroom. I’ve always loved browsing Pinterest when looking for bathroom inspiration – scrolling through picture after picture of crisp white shiplap walls with cute little soap dispensers nestled inside glass mason jars. “Ooooh, farmhouse style.” Fake it until you make it, right?

Wrong. If you buy a cuttlefish stencil wallart that says ‘BLESSED’ across your bathroom, you don’t automatically win farmhouse bathroom points. All you do is guarantee that every other person who bought the same piece from the same store will have it in their home too.

Then, while on a weekend break in the Cotswolds with friends, I visited my friend Sarah’s cottage. Sarah’s bathroom wasn’t trendily trying to be farmhouse chic – it was quietly farmhouse.

Her walls were covered in an antique washstand top that she painted a weathered blue-grey hue.

It probably hadn’t seen a paintbrush in 50 years, and it never occurred to me that that was something you could do in a bathroom until Sarah showed me hers. In her room stood an old wooden stool, perched neatly beside the sink piled high with hand towels that had obviously been washed a hundred times (vs my Pinterest aesthetic hand towels artfully draped over a pipe for show). Her mirror looked old.

Not like the cheap new mirrors I tried hanging up that just had sticky-backed artificial age lines around the edges to ‘make them look distressed’. Sarah’s mirror was actually distressed. It was in this moment I realised I had farmhouse bathrooms all wrong… Farmhouse bathrooms take years to look like they’ve evolved over time.

You don’t just purchase a farmhouse-style sink online alongside a cute stack of plates and call it a day. Build your bathroom slowly, invest in pieces you love that will stand the test of time and stock up on elbow grease. The minute I walked out of Sarah’s cottage I headed straight to Anthropologie and returned the $80 farmhouse-style ladder I had purchased just a week prior, that was supposed to magically transform my space into a farmhouse by holding my hand towels (yes they actually sell people towels on ladders – who stores towels on a ladder?!).

Total waste of money. Find yourself an old washstand instead. The one I bought from my local salvage yard became my vanity base.

It took some elbow grease to soften the wood back up and repair the wooden drawer which was glued shut through years of dried out dirt and grime, but after treating the wood with some conditioning oil and planing out the drawer runners it became my new favourite piece. Anthropologie’s similar replacement costs $600. Lesson number 2 learnt: Just because something looks ‘natural’, doesn’t mean it will hold up in a bathroom.

Yes reclaimed barn wood shelves would have looked AMAZING in my bathroom. Bright, white walls paired with dark, rustic wood cutting boards as shelves? Oh yeah.

Sign me up. Trust me when I say untreated old wood and a humid bathroom DO NOT MIX. After three months the wood warped and became musty.

I had to gut it all. Instead, opt for REAL wood boards with authentic age to them. I found mine at a local reclamation yard.

Note they will likely be sealed properly to prevent moisture from seeping into the wood and warping it, unlike old barn wood. You’ll pay more money for wood that’s properly treated for your bathroom (£45ish per linear foot vs £20 for pine), but it will last. Shiplap can look amazing in a bathroom too.

PLEASE don’t buy the thin-ass plastic sheets of ‘shiplap’ from your local hardware store and pretend you’re winning life. Trust me, I did this for my downstairs toilet and it was disgusting within six months. The seams started collecting mildew and it was a pain to clean.

Spend the money on REAL wood planks that will age beautifully (that means triple the price of that fake shiplap). It will look dated in 5 years when REAL shiplap is en vogue again. So what’s the point of my endless spiel on shiplap?

Pick your colour wisely. Farmhouse bathrooms typically showcase bright, white walls. That’s great and all but let’s be honest, bathrooms that look like this don’t exactly scream farmhouse lived-in vibe, do they?

If you want to keep some white make sure you stick with traditional farmhouse colours. Why? Because they were chosen back in the day for a reason.

They hid dirt, helped reflect whatever light source they had access to and used pigments that were easily accessible. I went with an off-white creamy colour for my walls (Farrow & Ball ‘Pointing’ to be exact) and added some sage green colour accents via my window frame and old washstand. SHOP LIGHTING Fixtures were everything in completing my bathroom.

I despised the industrial-looking spotlight fixtures above my sink and opted for a vintage-y looking pendant light (and table lamp on the windowsill, I know, I lost my mind too). But hear me out, that ambient lighting from the pendant light at night turned my bathroom into a relaxing sanctuary. The light itself cost me £95 from a local lighting store, but it was 100% worth it.

Forget cute little DIY woven baskets you cut your laundry sheets into to make them look ‘ Boho-chic’. And PLEASE DON’T USE PLASTIC BASKETS. Stock up on woven baskets that can actually be washed with your towels.

Hide them under your sink or pile them on your vanity for funky storage spots. An old enamelware jug works wonders for holding your makeup brushes too. Glass jars can house cotton wool or(q-tips – whoever coined that horrible term should be shot).

This was one thing I got right on the first try but still wish I’d gone with wood in the end. Tile costs less than wood but it never looks or feels like a farmhouse to me. The tiles I opted for were white with ‘grit’ mixed in and it amplified the sound of EVERYTHING in my bathroom.

Water drops sounded like someone falling from the roof. And lord did it feel cold underfoot. If you want that cozy, farmhouse feeling under your toes go with wide planks of oak and seal them properly to be bathroom-worthy.

It may cost you a little extra but you’ll thank me when you’re baking your feet in the bathroom during winter. Also bonus points, wood will eventually age gracefully. Tiles will not.

Fun fact – I tried at least four different mirrors before I found ‘the one’. Turns out, once again, you don’t need to spend much money to find a great mirror. Stop by your local house clearance sale and look for simple rectangular shapes.

Landlords love to update these suckers when they rent, and you can score some amazing vintage gems for next to nothing. Mine was probably from the 1940s or 1950s and cost me fifteen pounds. It has a couple black spots on the silvering but adds to the ‘vibe’, if you will.

Anthropologie sells a “weathered mirror” that looks exactly like mine for $200.

Don’t fall for the tricks they try. I spent about eight months DIY’ing my bathroom and spent roughly £2,400 in the process.

The large chunks of that budget went to my trusted washstand and investing in the proper wood floors (eventually ripped these out and replaced them with the right stuff). Yes you could have purchased the trendy farmhouse decor from Etsy and Anthropologie and achieved a ‘similar look’ for about the same amount, but it would have looked (and felt) cheap within a year. My salvage yard washstand?

That will only get better with time. Trust. The next time someone compliments how ‘farmhousey’ your bathroom is, will be the first and last time you hear it.

They won’t try and paint their bathroom sage green to match your pretty pillows. Instead they’ll compliment how comfortable it feels. Real.

That’s what I was going for.