Retro style brings a playful, confident edge to a bathroom: bold geometric shapes, a warm nostalgic palette of mustard, burnt orange, and avocado, and pattern used with none of the restraint you might expect elsewhere in the house. Large format tiles in a calmer neutral tone provide an easy, low-maintenance base for floors and the main walls, leaving the more decorative pieces to do their work on a feature wall or inside the shower.
A shower niche is an especially good spot for a bold retro pattern, since it is a small, contained area where a strong colour or shape reads as a deliberate design choice rather than an overwhelming one. Tiled surfaces also cope far better with steam and splashing than paint. As with any bathroom, we would always recommend a naturally finished or textured tile for the floor itself, since polished finishes become slippery once wet.