Home Improvement
Dreaming of green tile since high school, here’s how a Cambridge couple made the most of a double bathroom (plus pantry) renovation
Cambridge’s Nick Andersen and Luke Massa were in San Francisco for a friend’s wedding, but they just had to make a pit stop to see their tile source.
The couple had just finished renovating their condo with two dream bathrooms tiled in Heath Ceramics. While checking out with a vase, Andersen told the cashier about the bathroom renovations, and she said, “‘Oh my God. I know your bathrooms. Everyone here knows your bathrooms.’”
The couple’s bathrooms — both a green-tiled main bathroom and a blue-tiled powder room — are now featured on Heath’s site as the definition of bathroom inspiration.
“I was ashamed of how affirming it was that the people at the tile warehouse knew our bathroom, but it absolutely was,” said Andersen.
The main bathroom also landed in a January Architectural Digest roundup, along with a few other Massachusetts bathrooms.
After meeting in 2015 at a local potluck dinner, Andersen, an audio producer/cheesemonger, and Massa, a software engineer at TripAdvisor, moved into a spot right on the Cambridge/Somerville line. Literally. The town line runs through their home. “It’s a nightmare,” Andersen quipped.
They bought the condo in 2019, and by 2024, they wanted to renovate their main bathroom and turn part of the pantry into a powder room. Through an ex-boyfriend of Andersen’s, they connected with Doug Jack of Boston-based Nidify Studio to create two dream bathrooms and a pantry for under $91,000.
“Nick sent the most beautiful program email I’ve ever received. It had such clear vision and purpose. I gravitated towards it because they wanted to do something visionary,” said Jack. “For most people, the program email is a quantitative list: ‘I need a bedroom, a big kitchen, etc.’ Nick’s was qualitative with design detail. He said he’d loved a particular lobby at his [Michigan] high school, with green Pewabic tile. I had to look it up.”
“Luke makes fun of me because he’s like, ‘I don’t know if I remember the lobby of my high school — and I certainly wouldn’t want our bathroom to look like that,’” Andersen added.
They ended up not using Pewabic tile — a 123-year-old Detroit-based pottery maker — but the inspiration remained.
“From the start, I said if we’re building a bathroom around special tile, we can’t just find some random cheap tile from a big factory. The tile itself is part of the narrative,” said Jack. “I thought of [California-based] Heath Ceramics. Everything is handmade, one batch at the time. Each tile is unique. From a distance, it looks united. But close up, each tile feels different. You can tell it’s not from a big factory.”
The powder room took space from the existing pantry, which is underneath the home’s staircase. Gravitating toward primary colors, they chose a bright cerulean blue. The remaining smaller pantry space was outfitted with closed cabinetry to keep everything tidy.
Speaking of looking tidy, Jack said they made conscious design choices to “curate the view” of the spaces.
“You’ll notice in the photographs the toilet doesn’t appear — that’s by design. Basically, it’s rotated 90 degrees, and tucked around the corner,” he said.
In terms of staying on budget, Jack’s advice is to choose just a few focal design elements that will have a high impact and not cheap out on them. Andersen and Massa splurged on some luxuries: the tile, radiant heat in the full bathroom, a shower that allows users to choose their exact temperature, and a yellow concrete sink from Kast for the half-bath.
“Where we saved: we scrapped the idea for a second window in the main bathroom. It’s a little darker in that area — it would’ve been nice to have light — but [we saved there],” said Andersen. “We also saved on the structure. Some of Doug’s original ideas would’ve changed the physical structure, like moving a wall. In the end, we saved and stayed with the same footprint.”
“At one point, the bathroom door was getting really tight on the jam trim with new finishes. Instead of replacing the door, we slimmed down the plaster,” added Jack. “A renovation in an old home like this, those forks in the road happen frequently, and Nick and Luke were good at sticking to the more frugal options.
“Also, the yellow sink sits on stone. We saved money by going to a local stone yard, Dover Stone, and looking through the remnant pile,” said Jack. “You can find smaller pieces at a really great rate.”
“Doug gave us an array of options, which made us feel good about the choices that we went with— it didn’t feel like we were being stingy or extravagant,” said Massa
Final advice to aspiring remodelers:
“Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have done both bathrooms at once because we had no bathroom for a very long time. We’re very grateful that a friend of ours in this building let us shower for seven months,” said Andersen. “We had a Bath Ball to celebrate when renovations were finished … We crowned our upstairs neighbor the Queen of the Bath Ball with a tiara because she let us use her bathroom for so long.”
Vendors
Designer: Doug Jack, Nidify Studio — Boston
Tile: Heath Ceramics — California
Sink: Kask — United Kingdom
Sink base: Dover Stone — Danvers
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