The shower niche was a little bit inspired by the golden niche in the bathroom of the Art Deco Eltham Palace, London. This was the medieval palace redecorated by the Courtauld family in the 1930s. It figures a lot in episodes of Poirot. They don’t often show the bathroom. The stone bath and the niche work really well, although the statue is a bit lame. At Montacute we couldn’t quite afford all gold mosaic tiles, so we went for a black theme with a glittering niche. The point of a niche like this is that it can be ‘inhabited’ by a full-size statue. In the absence of a statue, a person will do!
