Milestone Makeovers: A Healthier Bathroom for Bethany’s Growing Kids
Bethany, a family photographer in Los Angeles, is at the phase of parenting where she’s having to let go. She’s watched her two kids grow and learn, and she’s already nostalgic for their first, early days together. Childhood is marked by memories, and Bethany wanted to savor each one. And as a family photographer, she’s especially in touch with how a family’s home becomes the backdrop for these moments.
Milestone Makeover: Bethany’s Bathroom
Location: Los Angeles
Goal: To give her kids a healthier bathroom
Problem: Mold and mildew in a small, high-traffic space
Solution: Aura® Bath & Spa by Benjamin Moore®
Bethany’s retro bathroom has the iconic pink tiles so popular in postwar houses, and even came with pink walls to match – or so she thought. After looking closely, she realized the paint was actually yellow, but the bright pink tiles in such a small room were reflecting onto the walls’ glossy finish, and it was all just too pink. High gloss wasn’t her choice, but like many, she assumed bathroom walls had to be glossy to keep mold maintenance easy.
Keeping the bathroom healthy is especially important to her, given how much time she and her kids spend in it at this transitional phase of learning to brush their own teeth and “wipe their own bums.” Yet, she didn’t want to introduce harsh cleaning chemicals into such an intimate space. The two choices, as she was it, were a too-pink gloss or a mold-happy matte.
What Bethany didn’t realize is that you can use a matte finish in muggy spaces like the bathroom. Benjamin Moore’s Aura Bath & Spa line was created for this exact purpose. A premium-quality interior paint, it was formulated to resist mildew in high-humidity areas. This was important to Bethany because she wanted to keep her bathroom a holistic, healthy space, as free of chemical cleaners as possible. Stopping mold from even starting to grow eliminated the need to rely on chemicals as much, but the Aura line was developed to stand up to them when they’re unavoidable.
This freed Bethany to get rid of the unpleasing color in a room she had identified as one that she would look back on as a surprising touchstone of parenthood.
To keep the blinding pink at bay, Bethany used Simply White in Aura Bath & Spa’s matte finish, a clean and crisp multi-purpose white whose versatility made it Benjamin Moore’s 2016 Color of the Year. The result was walls in a true white that wouldn’t reflect the pink tiles. And more than that, a more pleasant room for Bethany and her kids during an important (emotional) time, when she was being phased out of her little ones’ bathroom rituals.
In a few years – perhaps fewer than she wants – Bethany will look back on this transitional moment with pride and memories of “soft, squishy cheeks.”
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