The good news is that small bathrooms have never been better served by the products available. The brands we stock at Design Time — Roper Rhodes, Villeroy & Boch, Laufen and Bagnodesign — all produce furniture and sanitaryware specifically engineered for smaller spaces, with storage built into every element rather than bolted on as an afterthought. This guide walks you through every practical storage strategy for a small bathroom, with specific product solutions from the ranges we carry in our Nottingham showroom.
Start With the Basin — It Is Your Biggest Storage Opportunity
In most small bathrooms the basin takes up significant floor and wall space. Choosing the right basin unit is therefore the single most impactful storage decision you will make. A pedestal basin — still fitted in thousands of Nottingham homes — offers zero storage. Replacing it with a vanity unit immediately changes the dynamic of the entire room.
Roper Rhodes produce some of the most storage-efficient vanity units available in the UK. Their range runs from a petite 400mm cloakroom unit all the way up to a 1200mm double basin unit, with every size in between available in both wall-hung and floor-standing configurations. The wall-hung options are particularly valuable in small bathrooms because they visually extend the floor area — the eye reads continuous flooring under the unit as more space than it actually is. Practically, wall-hung units are also easier to clean around.
What sets Roper Rhodes apart for small bathroom storage specifically is the drawer configuration inside the units. Rather than a single door opening onto a dark cupboard, the better units in their range — the Walcot, Faber and Hampton collections — feature soft-close drawers with optional in-drawer dividers and even in-drawer lighting strips. This means toiletries, medications and everyday essentials are genuinely organised rather than just hidden. Many units also come with the option of in-drawer boxes so the interior is as considered as the exterior.
Villeroy & Boch approach small bathroom vanity storage differently. Their Architectura collection offers compact units from just 36cm wide — one of the narrowest in any premium range — making it possible to incorporate a proper vanity unit into spaces that most designers would give up on. The Avento collection goes down to 340mm in width. Both collections feature soft-close drawers and doors, pull-out internal compartments and surface finishes in their CeramicPlus technology that resist staining and limescale — a practical consideration for a unit that will be used daily for years.
Go Vertical — Wall Space Is Free Storage
The most consistently underused resource in a small bathroom is the wall space above eye level. Most people design to around 1.8 metres and leave the remaining wall space blank. This is wasted storage in a room where every centimetre counts.
Tall storage units — either freestanding or wall-hung — transform this dead space into genuinely useful storage without encroaching on the floor area. Roper Rhodes produce tall bathroom storage units designed specifically to complement their vanity furniture, colour-matched across every finish in their range so the result feels designed rather than assembled from different sources. A tall unit paired with a matching vanity creates a furniture run that fills the vertical space efficiently while maintaining visual coherence.
Mirror cabinets are the most space-efficient storage solution in any small bathroom — they occupy a surface you would fill with a mirror anyway, and the storage is effectively free. Roper Rhodes produce an extensive range of illuminated mirror cabinets, available in single and double door configurations, with internal shelving designed to accommodate everything from tall bottles to small containers. The illumination serves a dual purpose — it provides task lighting at the mirror and reduces the need for separate light fittings, which frees up ceiling and wall space elsewhere.
Villeroy & Boch mirror cabinets integrate cleanly with their sanitaryware collections, with suspended shelf units and mirror cabinet combinations available to create a full wall of storage above the basin area. Their approach — described as providing storage solutions ranging from a small guest bathroom to a luxurious spa — is particularly relevant for en-suites where the aesthetic needs to feel considered at close quarters.
Choose Wall-Hung Sanitaryware Throughout
One of the most effective ways to maximise a small bathroom is to remove everything from the floor. Wall-hung WCs — sometimes called back-to-wall toilets — eliminate the visual weight of a floor-standing pan and the cleaning difficulty of a pedestal. The cistern is concealed within the wall or within a slimline frame unit, and the result is significantly more visual space at floor level.
Laufen, one of the Swiss brands we stock at Design Time, produce some of the most refined wall-hung sanitaryware available. Their rimless flush technology — the LCC coating on many of their ceramic pieces — makes the WC genuinely easier to clean than a traditional pan, which is a practical advantage in any bathroom but particularly in a small one where surfaces are more visible. A wall-hung Laufen WC paired with a Roper Rhodes back-to-wall unit creates a seamless toilet area that reads as a single element rather than a collection of separate components.
The frame system behind a wall-hung WC can also be used to build in additional storage. Roper Rhodes back-to-wall WC units incorporate cupboard space either side of or below the pan, turning what would otherwise be dead space into a home for cleaning products, spare toilet rolls and bathroom essentials. In a small bathroom where every unit of storage matters, a well-designed back-to-wall system adds meaningful capacity without adding any visual bulk.
Use Every Alcove and Recess
Most bathrooms have at least one opportunity for recessed storage that goes untaken. The space between studs on a stud wall is typically 100mm deep — enough for a recessed niche that holds shampoos, conditioners and shower gel without any protrusion into the room. A recessed niche tiled to match the surrounding wall surface becomes part of the room rather than a feature added to it.
If your bathroom has a chimney breast or a section of wall that projects into the room, this almost always represents an opportunity for a built-in storage cabinet that uses the alcove space without adding projection. Similarly, the space under a sloping ceiling in a loft conversion or the awkward corner beside a door frame are both candidates for bespoke storage units that standard off-the-shelf furniture cannot accommodate.
This is where Design Time’s approach to bespoke cabinetry becomes directly relevant to small bathroom storage. Working with cabinet manufacturers including Burbidge, we can specify units built to the exact dimensions of your bathroom — filling an alcove to the millimetre rather than leaving gaps either side of a standard-width unit. For a bathroom with non-standard proportions, bespoke fitted furniture is often the only way to genuinely maximise the available storage.
Think About Towel Storage Differently
Towels take up more space than most people account for in bathroom planning. A heated towel rail that doubles as a radiator is standard. But in a small bathroom the towel rail should be working harder than just keeping towels warm — it should be positioned to dry towels efficiently so they do not need to be moved elsewhere, and ideally placed on a wall that does not interrupt the traffic flow through the room.
Bagnodesign, whose brassware we stock at Design Time, produce heated towel rails in a range of sizes and configurations including ladder rails, angled rails and wall-mounted bars that can be positioned at different heights to accommodate both full bath towels and smaller hand towels simultaneously. Choosing a rail that is appropriately sized — not oversized for the room — and positioning it on the most useful wall for drying and access is part of the storage planning process rather than an afterthought.
For additional towel storage beyond the rail, recessed niches, open wall shelving above the WC, and the top surface of a tall storage unit are all options that keep towels accessible without taking up floor space or creating visual clutter.
Consider a Shower Niche Instead of a Shower Caddy
Shower caddies — the hanging or corner-mounted accessories used to store products in the shower — are universally disliked once bathrooms are designed properly. They collect limescale, they fall off when loaded and they look exactly like what they are — a compromise. A tiled shower niche built into the shower wall during installation is more hygienic, easier to clean, more visually appealing and more practical.
A single niche — typically 300mm wide and 100mm deep, positioned at a comfortable height — is enough to hold four or five products neatly. Two niches of different sizes accommodate a wider range of products without any visual clutter. The niche can be tiled in the same tile as the surround for a seamless look, or in a contrasting tile or Ca’Pietra stone to create a deliberate design detail within the shower enclosure.
Ca’Pietra, whose natural stone and tile collections we stock at Design Time, produce formats ideal for lining shower niches — from small mosaic tiles that create a jewel-like interior surface to larger format stone slabs that make a single niche feel like a considered design feature rather than a practical addition.
Lighting and Mirrors — The Storage-Adjacent Decisions That Matter
Good lighting makes a small bathroom feel larger and makes storage more accessible. A single ceiling light in a small bathroom typically creates shadows at exactly the points where you need to see clearly — at the mirror and inside storage units. Task lighting at the mirror level, combined with a ceiling fitting, eliminates these shadows and makes the room feel more generous than it is.
As mentioned above, an illuminated mirror cabinet solves the lighting question at the mirror and adds storage simultaneously. For the ceiling, a recessed downlight fitting takes up no visual space. Roper Rhodes produce illuminated mirror cabinets with integrated demister pads and shaver sockets — removing the need for separate fittings for these functions and simplifying the electrical requirements of the room overall.
The mirror itself, independent of storage, is one of the most powerful tools for making a small bathroom feel larger. A full-width mirror — running the full width of the basin area rather than a small centred mirror — doubles the perceived depth of the room. Combined with an illuminated mirror cabinet or a mirror running to the ceiling, the effect is a bathroom that reads as significantly larger than its actual dimensions.
The Design Time Approach to Small Bathroom Storage
Every storage decision in a small bathroom is also a design decision. The brands we stock at Design Time — Roper Rhodes, Villeroy & Boch, Laufen, Bagnodesign and Ca’Pietra — all produce ranges where the storage products are designed to work together as a coherent whole rather than as individual pieces sourced from different suppliers. This matters in a small bathroom because visual coherence — furniture, sanitaryware, brassware and tiles from the same design family — makes the room feel intentional and calm rather than busy and cluttered.
Our design consultations at our West Bridgford showroom start with understanding how you use your bathroom and what you need to store, then work backward from there to specify the right combination of products. For small bathrooms in particular, we often find that clients come in thinking they cannot achieve what they want within their space — and leave with a design that achieves everything they need and looks considerably better than they expected.
If you have a small bathroom that needs to work harder, visit our Nottingham showroom at 1A Mabel Grove, West Bridgford, NG2 5GT, or call us on 0115 981 8981 to book a free design consultation. We are open six days a week and walk-ins are always welcome.