The Original Bath Is Having a Moment

In estate houses from Palm Beach to the Hamptons, the bathroom has long been the room most likely to get gutted first and mourned second — and designers are increasingly arguing against that reflex. Rather than treating a vintage tub, tiled wainscoting, or pedestal sink as an obstacle to modernizing, a number of architects and design professionals are making the case that these details are structural to a house's identity, not incidental to it. The debate now shaping renovation decisions in older American homes is less about resisting change than about sequencing it: what can be restored, what must be updated, and how much of a house's original hand is worth preserving in the process. For owners weighing a remodel, that calculus is becoming as much a matter of taste as of plumbing.

With reporting from Architectural Digest.