Journal · Bathrooms
Decide the threshold before the tiles
Searches for accessible bathrooms rose 408% in the first quarter of 2026. What people actually fitted moved by two percentage points. The gap is worth understanding, because a level threshold is decided once — before anything is tiled.
Houzz published its 2026 UK Emerging Trends Report on 4 June. Among the sharpest movements anywhere in it: searches for “accessible bathroom” were up 408% on the same quarter a year earlier. Showers with seats were up 84%.
Before that number does any work, it needs its caveat. This is search volume on Houzz — January to March 2026 against January to March 2025. It measures what people looked up, not what anyone built, and a 408% rise from a base the report does not publish is not a statement about scale.
Two datasets, measuring different things
rise in searches for “accessible bathroom”
rise in searches for “shower with seat”
actually fitted a shower with no threshold
made the shower bigger
The two figures on the left are search interest in early 2026. The two on the right are from a different study entirely — the 2025 UK Houzz Bathroom Trends Study, which asked 330 UK homeowners in May and June 2025 what they had actually done to their bathrooms.
Put side by side, they describe a familiar pattern: interest running well ahead of installation.
There is a second pattern inside the search data itself. The four terms did not rise equally: accessible bathroom 408%, shower with seat 84%, walk-in shower 37%, wet room 19%. The rise gets smaller as the term gets more specific about construction. People are searching for the outcome they want, not the method that delivers it — which is roughly what you would expect, and a fair description of where most of these conversations start.
What people actually fitted
58% made the shower bigger, and a quarter of everyone surveyed expanded it by more than half. That part is emphatic. The threshold, though, moved slowly. Walk-in showers with a low threshold went from 28% to 29% year on year. Walk-ins with no threshold at all went from 12% to 14%.
Shower types chosen in a bathroom renovation
Share of UK homeowners, 2025 UK Houzz Bathroom Trends Study
| Corner | 32% | |
|---|---|---|
| Low threshold | 29% | |
| No threshold | 14% |
The study lists only the leading types, so these do not total 100%. Based on 330 UK respondents surveyed May–June 2025. The 408% figure elsewhere in this piece is from a separate 2026 report measuring search volume, not installations — the two are not comparable and are not plotted together.
Two points in a year is real movement, not noise — but it is not a 408% movement. The honest reading is that a lot more people are thinking about this than have done it, and that the thinking is running about a year ahead of the tiling.
A level threshold is not a feature you add later. It is a decision about where the floor sits, made before anything is tiled.
Cheap now, impossible later
This is why the gap matters more than either number. Most of what makes a bathroom work in twenty years costs very little at first fix and cannot be retrofitted without taking the room apart again.
A level threshold is the clearest example. Losing the step means the falls in the floor, the drainage position and the build-up under the tiles all have to be right before a single tile is laid. Add it afterwards and you are lifting the floor, re-tanking and re-tiling — which is most of a new bathroom.
The same is true, more cheaply, of the things nobody sees. Timber blocking behind the plasterboard where a grab rail or a fold-down seat might one day go costs a few pounds and an hour while the walls are open. Without it you are fixing into plasterboard later, or opening the wall again. We put it in whether or not anyone asks, because the alternative is a conversation nobody wants to have in a decade.
A seat is the same decision wearing different clothes. The searches for one were up 84%, and it is not really a product choice — it is a structural fixing, a drainage fall that still works with someone sitting in the way, and enough width that the seat does not make the shower unusable for everyone else. Decided at drawing stage it is unremarkable. Decided afterwards it is a bracket screwed into tile.
Door swing and clear width are layout decisions, settled on the drawing rather than on site. And if the room is genuinely too tight, the study points at the usual answer: 21% of homeowners enlarged the bathroom, and 28% of those took the space from an adjoining bedroom rather than extending. A bedroom losing 400mm is often what makes a level-access shower possible at all.
What we’d take from it
Don’t specify a bathroom because searches for it went up 408%. Do take the direction seriously, because the cost of these decisions is wildly asymmetric. Sort the floor and the blocking at first fix and you have kept your options open for the life of the room. Skip them and the option is gone until the next refit.
The caveats are worth keeping in view: 330 respondents is a modest sample, the survey data is a year older than the search data, and search interest is not intent. But nothing in either number argues for leaving the decision until the tiler arrives — and that is really the only decision this article is asking you to make early.