At the end of last summer I finished a master bathroom on a farm in Buckeystown that I still think about. We gutted the whole thing and rebuilt it, and the shower ended up using five different tile and stone materials. It is close to an artistic masterpiece and I do not say that about my own work often.
The swap that made it work
The room had a gigantic bathtub and a small shower. Almost nobody uses a tub that size more than a few times a year, and everybody uses the shower every day.
So we flipped it. The gigantic tub became a gigantic shower. The small shower became a steam room.
That is the decision the whole bathroom hangs on. Same footprint, completely different daily experience.
Five materials in one shower
Most showers use one tile, maybe two. This one used five different tiles and stones together.
Every material you add multiplies the work. Different materials cut differently, they have different thicknesses, and where two of them meet you have to make a decision about how that edge is going to look and then execute it identically everywhere that pairing occurs.
There were also five stacked niches instead of the usual one. A niche is a hole in a waterproofed wall, so every niche is a place you could leak, and every one has to be built, waterproofed and tiled with the same care as the rest of the wall. Five of them stacked means five times the layout work and no room for any of them to be out of line with the others, because you can see all five at once.
The trough drain
The floor uses a trough drain rather than a round center drain.
Plumbing-wise it is not much different. The hard part is height. The drain has to sit exactly flush with the finished tile, and the pan has to slope to it evenly across its whole length. A round drain gives you a cone to work with and a little forgiveness. A trough gives you a line, and a line shows every error.
Get it a little high and water sits on the floor. A little low and you get a lip you can feel with your foot.
The glass
The shower door was its own project. A four-foot knee wall with glass sitting on top of it, a door beside that, and another panel of glass running to the wall.
Glass is unforgiving because it does not bend to meet your framing. Whatever you build has to be square and plumb before the glass is measured, because the glass will be cut to exactly what you built. If your knee wall is off by a quarter inch, you find out when a very expensive custom panel does not sit right.
There are multiple shower heads and sprayers on different walls too, which means the valve work behind the tile had to be planned before a single piece went up.
Why this one mattered
A job like this is mostly sequencing. The waterproofing has to be right before the tile, the framing has to be right before the glass, the drain height has to be right before the pan, and none of it can be revisited once the next layer is on.
The cherry vanities went in at the end and finished the room.
If you are thinking about something ambitious in a bathroom, the honest advice is to decide early and stop changing your mind. Complexity is fine. Complexity plus changes halfway through is where jobs go wrong.