Making a small bathroom work
In a small bathroom the wins are structural, not decorative. Most of them happen before the first tile goes on.
Most advice about small bathrooms is about colour. Light tiles, big mirror, done. It is not wrong, it is just the least effective thing on the list.
The decisions that actually buy you room are structural, and almost all of them happen before anything visible goes in.
Wall-hung anything
A wall-hung pan and a wall-hung vanity unit both put the floor back in view, and a floor you can see reads as a bigger floor. It also makes the room far easier to clean, which matters more in a small space where every surface is within reach of every other one.
The catch is the frame behind it. Wall-hung is only as good as what the frame is fixed to, and that is a decision made at first fix, not at the end.
A walk-in instead of a tray and a door
A shower door needs somewhere to swing or slide. A walk-in does not. In a room under four square metres that is often the single biggest gain available, and it costs nothing extra in materials.
It does need the falls to be right, because there is no upstand catching your mistakes.
A linear drain
A single channel instead of a centre gully means the floor falls one way rather than four. Fewer cuts, fewer awkward tile angles, and a floor that reads as one surface instead of a grid pointing at a hole in the middle.
Recesses instead of shelves
A recess formed in the wall itself and tiled like the rest of it gives you storage that takes up no room at all. Nothing sticks out, nothing comes loose, and there is no bracket collecting limescale. It has to be planned at the stud stage, which is the whole point: in a small room, storage is a first-fix decision.
Where the cuts land
This is the one nobody mentions and everybody notices. Setting out decides where the cut tiles end up. Get it wrong and you have a sliver of tile in the most visible corner of a room you look at from a metre away, every day, for twenty years.
In a large bathroom a slightly awkward cut disappears behind a door. In a small one there is nowhere for it to hide.
What does not help
Very small tiles, on the theory that small tiles suit a small room. They give you more grout lines, and more grout lines make a small room busier, not bigger. A large-format tile with fewer joints does the opposite.
And a bath squeezed in because the house feels like it should have one. If nobody uses it, it is the most expensive floor space in the building.