Your tile will co-ordinate beautifully with the timber if you can pick one of the darker colours out of the timber and select a tile in this family of colour. The trick to making a colour concept work is to either co-ordinate or contrast. If your timber is as busy with grain and colour as the image you've shown, then maybe co-coordinating is the best way to go. Never chose materials independently of each other - always take a tile sample home to see in the natural light, next to the timber. I hope it all works out the way you envisage it. Cheers, Michelle

Having experienced a leaking shower, a step down sounds like a welcome added precaution, which seems rarely done. Supposedly if there is no hob or atepdown there is an angle, and obviously the whole thing is supposed to slope towards the drain anyway, but BeachBathrooms' earlier comment about capillary action rings true. It became obvious very quickly in our other shower that water was creeping across the grout outside the shower so whatever was meant to be done either wasn't or wasn't correctly done. Then there's the modern hotel bathrooms I've experienced where the water simply splashes out too easily. All in the name of style.

I would suggest Luxury Vinyl Tiles, especially for a kitchen where the floor could get wet.

electric underfloor heating is great for bathrooms (and laundry, mudrooms, entry and hallways when it needs to be left on for weeks at a time and not much good for a ten minute shower) and is preferable to anything visible like hydronic heaters that take up wall space but your voids will suck most of the heat upstairs ..our reverse cycle AC has been much more economical to run than the whole floor electric slab heating that we had in our previous house (supplemented with a wood burner and gas log fire in our cold climate) but we made sure that the void over the stairs was able to be blocked off to zone heat downstairs with separate heating upstairs but having lived in different areas of Sydney i'm wondering why a new built well designed house with great insulation would need more than modest supplementary heating that can be more economically provided with AC