What is a five-piece bathroom? (2024)

Always wondered what a five piece bathroom is? Read on to find out...

Introduction

A four-piece bathroom, a five-piece bathroom, a half bathroom, a three-quarter bathroom and a full bathroom. Not to mention a cloakroom, a powder room, an en suite, and a Jack and Jill bathroom too. The amount of terminology involved in home and DIY is astounding and honestly, quite difficult for newcomers to understand.

Chances are that if you’ve been shopping around for a new home renovation or a current home redesign, you’ve seen these terms pop up.

While these are common industry ways to refer to bathrooms with different layouts, furnishings, and sizes, it is not always instantly clear why these bathroom styles are named the way they are. A better way of naming the five-piece bathroom might be the five-fixture bathroom, for reasons we will get into later on in this article.

Firstly, when it comes to planning for your new bathroom, you should be careful about the space that you have and how many fixtures you may want.

Fixtures of a five-piece bathroom

When we talk about a five-piece bathroom, we talk about a bathroom with five distinct plumbing features. This means that even though your toilet has a plumbing feature for water going into the tank and then a plumbing feature for waste material going out, the toilet itself is a single fixture.

Let’s first start with a simple comparison, a two-piece bathroom. A two-piece bathroom has a toilet and a wash basin, or a sink. This is incredibly important to know as this configuration is often referred to as the powder room or the cloakroom. This is because this half bath, or half bathroom, is commonly the configuration for a second bathroom.

This means that while you and your significant other probably have a large, fully-fledged bathroom either en suite or near to the master bedroom, the second bedroom will be accessible in the hallway and more public. This is sometimes used just to wash up and refresh a coat of makeup, therefore giving the name powder room.

Now, some two-piece bathrooms consist of a sink and a shower. This may be because this toilet is near the kitchen or the laundry area where there is a need for an open tap as well as a waste water outlet (like for example the shower drain or the sink) to pour away things like boiled wastewater and dirty mop bucket water. A flexible shower head, in combination with a low stool, is also extremely useful for hand-washing delicates.

When you scale up to a three-piece bathroom, then there can be a shower. This is most common for second bathrooms used as children’s bathrooms. When it becomes four-piece, then the most commonly added thing is a bathtub. Now, you are probably most familiar with the four-piece bathroom, so you might think what exactly is needed to be added to this since you have everything you’d need.

Uses of a five-piece bathroom

Well, think about the use case of your large bathroom. You’ll be sharing this bathroom with your significant other, so there’s a very real possibility that, especially if you two are preparing for an early day out or if you both have jobs that start in the morning, there will be two users of this bathroom at the same time. This can be where having two sinks can come in very handy.

At a glance, you might think that the sink is simply just another part of the toilet, but when you break it down, your sink is one of the most used fixtures in your bathroom. A sink with a mirror, especially if you don’t have space for a vanity in your master bedroom, is where you’d do your makeup, your morning skincare routine, brush your teeth, wash your face and apply contact lenses.

In short, aside from the toilet, and if you shower in the morning, the shower, the sink is primarily where you’ll spend your time preparing to go out.

If you’re sharing your bedroom not with a significant other but with someone you’re caring for like your elderly parent or your child, then having an extra sink can be good since you can both take your time going about your preparation and being in there at the same time allows you to keep your loved one in sight, making sure nothing goes wrong.

Lastly, another important fixture that is often added to existing four-piece bathrooms is a bidet. Bidets come in many shapes and sizes and have so many pros as compared to toilet paper that I won’t list in this article.

Know that if you have the space and you want to make a quick upgrade, the bidet should be your priority. It can promote better posterior health and help you reduce the risk of infection and plumbing issues, which makes it an A-plus in our book.

Why choose a five-piece bathroom?

Well, simply put, it’s future-proof. If you’re unsure if you and your partner will have kids, or if one of you is currently a homemaker and unsure if you’ll be back to working in the future after the kids can be sent to childcare, then having an additional sink isn’t a bad idea at all.

If you have the space to spare and some money to spare, adding an additional plumbing line and a sink fixture will not set you back very much, and if you’re planning to renovate your bathroom anyway, why not just have it there? Having a second sink might spur you on to have a large, long countertop which can be very useful, providing shelves that can hold decorative items and essential toiletries, adding an elevated air of luxury to your toilet.

Conclusion

This has been it for five-piece bathrooms. The additional piece, or fixture, may be very important to you or not at all depending on your living situation. As usual, before making any changes to your bathroom make sure to contact registered plumbers and electricians to do all the behind the walls work for you.

Here at Victoria Plum, we have a great range of baths and shower enclosures, including space-saving, compact options. Our staff are always happy to help, so why not speak to us about your bathroom needs and see if we can help you decide whether you need a shower enclosure or a bathtub?