Vanity, Storage, and Layout: A Bathroom Planning Guide

Updated September 2026 · 8 min read

Bathrooms are the smallest rooms we renovate and the most demanding per square foot. Everything has a required clearance, most things are plumbed, and the difference between a layout that works and one that irritates you daily is usually about four inches.

This guide covers the numbers that constrain a bathroom layout, how to choose and size a vanity, and how to get real storage into a room that doesn't have space for it.

Start with clearances, not with fixtures

You can't lay out a bathroom by pushing shapes around a floor plan. Fixtures need space around them to be usable, and some of those distances are set by code rather than preference.

These are widely used design guidelines; code minimums are local and sometimes stricter. Confirm with your building department before finalising a layout.

Sketch these clearances as rectangles on the floor plan first. What's left over is where things can actually go — and in a small bathroom, that usually resolves the layout for you.

The most expensive line on your plan

Before anything else: decide whether the plumbing moves.

Keeping the toilet, sink and shower drains where they are keeps a bathroom remodel in a predictable price band. Moving them means opening the floor, re-routing drain lines at the correct slope, and turning a plumber's hours into days. It is routinely the difference between a mid-range remodel and a top-of-range one, and it is frequently decided casually on an early sketch.

There are layouts worth moving plumbing for — a genuinely bad room, a wall coming down, real accessibility needs. But "the sink would look better over there" is an expensive sentence. Test whether the existing arrangement can be made to work first.

Choosing a vanity

Height

Two conventions:

• Standard height, around 32" — the traditional bathroom vanity. Better for children.
• Comfort height, around 36" — matches kitchen counter height. Much easier on adult backs, and now the more common choice.

Comfort height is right for most adult households. If small children are the primary users, standard height plus a step stool is more practical than the reverse.

Width and configuration

The honest case against the double vanity

Two sinks are the most requested feature that most bathrooms shouldn't have. Below about 60 inches, fitting two basins means two small bowls, almost no counter between them, and the loss of the deep central drawers that make a vanity useful. You gain a second tap you rarely use simultaneously and lose the storage you use every day.

If your vanity wall is under 60 inches, a single sink with generous counter and drawers is almost always the better room. If mornings genuinely collide, a second mirror and a separate outlet solve more of the real problem than a second basin does.

Storage: drawers beat doors

The single highest-value storage decision in a bathroom is choosing drawers over cabinet doors.

A cabinet with doors gives you a deep dark box with a drainpipe through the middle. Things go to the back and are never seen again. Drawers bring their contents to you, use the full depth, and can be organised. Drawers built around the plumbing — U-shaped to clear the trap — recover most of that lost volume.

Beyond the vanity, in rough order of value per dollar:

• A recessed medicine cabinet. Sits between studs, so it costs almost no floor area and holds everything small. Decide early — it must be framed at rough-in.
• A shower niche. Also between studs. Keeps bottles off the floor. Must be positioned and waterproofed before tile.
• Vertical wall storage above the toilet or in any dead corner — shallow shelving costs little and uses air.
• A tall narrow linen cabinet, 12–18" wide, in a gap that's otherwise wasted.
• Toe-kick drawers under the vanity for flat items.

Layout patterns that work

Most bathrooms resolve into a few arrangements:

• Three fixtures on one wall. Cheapest to plumb — one wet wall serves everything. Common in narrow bathrooms and worth preserving if you have it.
• Toilet and sink on one wall, shower opposite. Good use of a squarer room, still only two plumbing runs.
• Shower at the end of a narrow room. Puts the largest fixture where the room is already dead, and gives the shower two or three existing walls.
• Vanity facing the door. Makes a small bathroom feel larger, because the mirror is the first thing you see.

Two things to avoid: the toilet as the first thing visible from the doorway, and a door that swings into a fixture. Both are fixable on paper and permanent afterwards.

Details that decide whether it works

• Outlets at the vanity. More than you think, and at least one inside a drawer or cabinet for the things that live plugged in. GFCI protected.
• Where the towels actually go. Reachable from the shower without stepping across the room, dripping.
• Door swing. Check it clears the vanity and the toilet. A pocket door or an outswing door rescues a very tight room.
• The mirror's relationship to the light. Covered in our lighting guide — but plan them together, because the sconces and the mirror share a wall.
• Somewhere to put something down near the shower and near the toilet. Small, and the thing people miss most.

Layout checklist

Frequently asked questions