Townhouses ask a lot of a small footprint. Tall, narrow, and stacked across two, three, or even four levels, they squeeze a full home into a plan that is often no more than 16 to 20 feet wide. In the Chicagoland area, that shape shows up everywhere: vintage greystones in Lincoln Park, brick rowhomes in Old Town and Wicker Park, 1980s townhouse clusters in Schaumburg and Naperville, and the tidy attached homes that line blocks in Evanston, Oak Park, and Arlington Heights.
What these homes share is personality. What they also share is a set of very specific problems. Light reaches only the front and back. Stairs eat into every floor. Bathrooms are undersized, awkwardly placed, or stuck in a layout that made sense forty years ago. Kitchens and baths end up stacked over one another because that is where the plumbing stack runs, and moving that stack feels like an impossible ask.
At Century City Baths, we spend our days inside those constraints. Below are seven townhouse remodels that show how homeowners across the Chicagoland area kept the character that drew them to the house in the first place while bringing the daily experience up to modern standards.
1. A Lincoln Park Greystone That Traded a Hall Bath for a Real Primary Suite
The owners of this 1890s greystone townhouse loved the original millwork and the deep window casings on the parlor floor. What they did not love was sharing a single 5-by-7 hall bathroom between two adults and two kids.
The solution did not require an addition. We borrowed roughly 30 inches from an oversized rear bedroom closet and reframed the wall between the bedroom and the existing bath. That gave us enough width for a 60-inch double vanity, a curbless shower with a linear drain, and a private water closet. The hall bath stayed, but shrank slightly and became the kids’ bath with a tub.
The character piece: we salvaged the original transom window above the old bathroom door and reset it above the new suite entry. It moves borrowed light into the hallway and reads as if it was always there.
2. An Old Town Rowhome Where the Stair Became the Light Source
This three-story rowhome had a dark middle level. The stairwell was enclosed on both sides, and the second-floor bathroom sat in the deepest, darkest part of the plan with no window at all.
Rather than fight it, the homeowners leaned in. We replaced a section of the stairwell wall with a glass block and steel-framed partition, then specified a frosted glass pocket door for the bathroom. Light from the third-floor skylight now falls down the stair and into the bath. Inside, we used large-format porcelain in a warm limestone tone, a backlit mirror, and 3000K lighting on dimmers so the room never feels like a cave at night.
The takeaway: in a narrow townhouse, borrowed light is often more achievable than new windows, and it costs a fraction of cutting into masonry.
3. A Naperville Townhouse That Reworked Three Bathrooms on One Plumbing Stack
Many suburban Chicagoland townhouses from the late 1970s through the 1990s stack a powder room, a hall bath, and a primary bath on a single wet wall. That is usually treated as a limitation. Here it became an advantage.
Because all three rooms shared one stack, we phased the work efficiently and kept the existing drainage locations while completely changing how each room felt. The powder room got a wall-hung vanity and a bold wallpaper the owners had bookmarked for years. The hall bath swapped a builder-grade tub-shower for a deeper soaking tub with a tiled surround. The primary bath lost its garden tub, which had been used maybe twice, and gained a 48-by-60 shower with a bench and a handheld.
Total cost stayed well below what a relocated stack would have required, and the schedule held because no structural or major plumbing rerouting was involved.
4. An Evanston Townhome With a Basement Level That Finally Earned Its Keep
The lowest level of this Evanston townhome had a laundry area, a furnace closet, and a half bath that nobody wanted to use. The owners wanted a guest space for visiting family and a home gym.
We converted the half bath into a full three-quarter bath with a 36-by-48 shower. Below-grade work brings its own requirements, so the project included a sewage ejector pump, proper vapor management behind the tile, and a dedicated exhaust fan ducted to the exterior rather than into the joist bay. A frameless glass panel keeps the small room from feeling boxed in, and a heated floor makes a below-grade bath genuinely pleasant in February.
The laundry moved into a stacked closet with bifold doors, which freed up nearly 40 square feet.
5. A Wicker Park Townhouse That Kept the Clawfoot Tub and Modernized Everything Around It
Not every remodel should erase the original fixtures. This homeowner had a cast iron clawfoot tub in good condition and wanted it to stay.
We had the tub refinished and the exterior painted a deep charcoal, then built the rest of the room as a clean backdrop: hex mosaic floor tile, a simple shaker vanity, matte black supply lines and a floor-mounted tub filler, and a separate walk-in shower where a linen closet used to be. Waterproofing and a properly sloped shower pan did the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
The result reads as a vintage bath, but it performs like a new one, with adequate ventilation, GFCI protection, a code-compliant shower valve, and no more leaking around the old tub feet.
6. An Oak Park Attached Home That Added a Second-Floor Laundry and a Powder Room
Stairs are the tax you pay for living in a townhouse. Carrying laundry up and down three flights is one of the most common complaints we hear.
In this Oak Park project, we found space by combining two shallow hall closets into a single utility bay on the second floor. A stacked washer and dryer, a pan with a drain line, and a recessed shutoff box went in, along with sound insulation in the surrounding walls so the spin cycle does not broadcast through the bedrooms.
On the main level, a dead corner under the stair became a powder room. Headroom under a stair is tight, so we mapped the fixture locations against the stringer, placed the toilet at the tallest point, and used a corner sink. It measures barely 14 square feet and it changed how the family uses the whole first floor.
7. A Chicago Two-Flat Conversion That Made One Bathroom Serve Two Generations
This family converted a two-flat into a single-family home with an in-law arrangement for aging parents. The second-floor bath had to work for both grandparents and grandchildren.
Universal design drove every decision. The shower is curbless with a 36-inch clear entry and a fold-down teak seat. Blocking went into the walls for grab bars, with two installed now and mounting points ready for more. The vanity sits at 34 inches with knee clearance on one side. Lever handles, a comfort-height toilet, slip-resistant floor tile with a high coefficient of friction, and a wide-swing door round it out.
None of it looks clinical. Visitors read it as a well-designed contemporary bath. That is the point. Accessible design and good design are not separate categories.
What These Projects Have in Common
Across all seven, a few principles repeat:
Work with the plumbing stack, not against it. Relocating a stack in a multi-level townhouse means opening floors and ceilings on more than one level. Sometimes it is worth it. Often, keeping fixtures within a few feet of existing drain locations buys you a better shower, better tile, and better lighting for the same budget.
Steal from closets and hallways before you consider an addition. Townhouse square footage is rarely distributed well. An oversized closet, a dead stair corner, or a redundant hallway can usually give up the 24 to 36 inches that transforms a cramped bath.
Treat light as a material. Transoms, frosted pocket doors, glass partitions, skylights over stairwells, and layered artificial lighting all move light deeper into a narrow plan.
Keep one or two original elements on purpose. Original millwork, a refinished clawfoot tub, salvaged hardware, or a restored transom gives a new bathroom a sense of place. A townhouse bath that has no relationship to the house it sits in always feels slightly off.
Plan for the mechanicals you cannot see. Ventilation, waterproofing, ejector pumps below grade, sound insulation around laundry, and blocking for future grab bars are invisible when the job is finished and obvious when they were skipped.
Renovating a Townhouse Bath in the Chicagoland Area
Local realities matter here. Older Chicago townhouses often have galvanized supply lines, knob-and-tube remnants, or cast iron drains that have reached the end of their service life, and those get discovered once walls open. Suburban townhouses frequently sit inside homeowners associations with rules about work hours, shared walls, common-element plumbing, and required certificates of insurance. Permits differ meaningfully between the City of Chicago and surrounding municipalities.
We handle that groundwork as part of the project: pre-construction assessment, HOA documentation, permitting, dust and stair protection for shared entries, and a schedule that accounts for the reality that in a townhouse, your only bathroom might be the one under construction.
Ready to Talk About Your Townhouse?
If you are living with a bathroom that has not changed since the house was built, or a layout that fights you every morning, we would like to see it. Century City Baths designs and builds bathroom remodels throughout the Chicagoland area, from city rowhomes and greystones to suburban attached homes.
Reach out to schedule an in-home consultation. We will measure, look at your plumbing stack and framing, talk through what is realistic for your budget and timeline, and give you a clear written scope before any work begins.
