Why I recommend a double shower to young families in Canberra
Ask most Canberra homeowners why anyone would put in a double shower and you get the same answer: it is for a couple. I have been renovating bathrooms here since 2008, and I can count on one hand the couples who use one that way. The people who get the most out of a double shower are parents with young children.
What a double shower is
One shower, wide enough for two people, with its own head and controls at each end. One screen, one floor, one space. It is not two cubicles side by side. The one in the photo is from a job of ours in Wanniassa: a rail shower at each end, a lit niche running between them, and room for an adult and a child to stand under their own water.
It makes the everyday easier
For a few years a child cannot shower on their own. Most parents end up kneeling beside the bath, or squeezed into a single shower with the door open and water on the floor. A double shower takes the struggle out of it. You each have water at your own height, the child is in there with you instead of outside getting splashed, and nobody stands shivering waiting for a turn.
It gives you something you keep
That is the practical side. The side I care more about is what happens in that twenty minutes. Shower time with a three-year-old is talking time: no screen, no rush, just the two of you, every day. It is the kind of ordinary routine a child grows up inside, and the kind of memory a parent holds on to long after the child has outgrown it. By eight or nine they want the door shut, and that time is gone. You do not get it back.
What it needs in the room
Width is what decides it, not the plumbing. In a lot of Canberra ensuites the only way to fit a double shower is to borrow space from the room next door, which is exactly what we did in Wanniassa. The waterproofed area is bigger, the floor has to fall to the drain across its full width, and the glass is larger, so it belongs in the design from the start, not added at the end. If the room cannot give it that width without squeezing the vanity or the toilet, a good single shower is the better choice.
My honest view
If you are young parents planning a bathroom renovation, I think a double shower is one of the best things you can spend on. Not for the tiles or the brass, but for the years when your child still wants to be in there with you. Those years are short, and they go faster than anyone tells you. When I build one for a young family, I know what it is really for. It is for the mornings and the bedtimes they will both remember.