Back to Basins

To put a spin on the ordinary, architect and furniture designer Brian Murphy of BAM Construction/Design in Santa Monica once created a chandelier out of a glass slab, a C clamp and six votive candles. He has also fashioned tables from white birch logs bundled with cable and a room divider from a grass hula skirt. Recently, Murphy focused his singular talents on the lowly bathroom sink, dreaming up one that’s sleekly contemporary and another that’s charmingly rustic.

For the modern Hollywood Hills home of radio commercial producer Bert Berdis and attorney Sherry Spees, Murphy took an 8-foot-tall sheet of stainless steel (bolted in place in case of earthquakes), cut a hole for the drain, then welded on a chevron-shaped plate. A custom mirror swivels on a ball joint at eye level. The powder room’s shimmery high-tech allure is so strong, Berdis reports, that every time he throws a party, half the guests huddle in the bathroom. “One stayed in there for 45 minutes,” he says.

For film director David Kellogg and his wife, Denise, Murphy adopted a completely different approach. In the skylit guest bathroom of the couple’s converted barn in Hidden Hills, the designer placed a $13 5-gallon galvanized steel bucket from Home Depot atop a eucalyptus stump fitted with a drain. Murphy extended his back-to-nature aesthetic to the towel hooks, using white birch sapling branches. Says Kellogg: “It’s very Zen.”