Cecilia -
An excellent work-around for the frosted glass issue. Unfortunately, it isn't quite applicable to my needs.
Here in San Francisco, houses generally can be built to 6 inches (1/2 foot) of the property line. (In practice, they often extend even nearer to the boundary than that; this is a photo of my cat who, having escaped outdoors, became disoriented during a thunderstorm and sought shelter between my and a neighbor's houses. After more than a week, we finally located her; after 4 hours of careful work, I managed to cut through interior and exterior walls to reach her, wedged into a spot a little more than 4 inches wide. [She was approximately 12 feet from the edge of the wall, nearly 3 feet lower than where she had entered, and somehow had managed to turn herself around.] She was wedged so tightly, it took another 90 minutes to free her.
) As one might imagine, there are all sorts of rules and regulations pertaining to windows placed along property lines. In an early stage of one design, I had chosen to keep the outside wall of a bathroom 5 feet from the edge of the property as sort of a light well between buildings. Currently, there are no windows in the room, as there is a tub/shower enclosure along the outside wall. In my plans, I changed this to a half-bath/powder room (that is, containing a sink and w.c. but no tub or shower), and I decided to add a frosted glass window to open the space up somewhat. That marked my first attempt to achieve a frosted glass effect -- one that needed to work even with strong backlighting. In the end, my inability to create such an effect caused me to eliminate the window, which in turn led me to eliminate the 5-foot setback, which had the happy result of opening up the design in unexpected ways, resulting in a much more organic and usable floor plan -- all for the want of frosted glass.
Two floors higher up, though, I again ran into problems. Because of other provisions in local planning codes, I found space to be at a premium in the master bedroom suite; I also found myself somewhat at a loss as how best to take advantage of an unparalleled view over the city. I hit upon the idea of having the rear wall of the bedroom also be the outer wall of the master bath shower -- a wall made from switchable or 'smart' glass: Depending on the setting, the wall could be 100% transparent, 100% frosted (about 92% opaque), or partly transparent and partly frosted, with a 30-inch-high modesty panel obscuring the bathers' 'naughty bits' from any telescope-equipped voyeurs based in Pacific Heights. This sent me on a repeated search for ways to fake frosted glass, with results as unsatisfying as my first. (To make things even more difficult, I'd spec'ed the shower to include Kohler illuminated "Raintiles" overhead, so the frosted illusion had to withstand a color wash of backlighting.) Ultimately, I chose to go with a 9% transparent white texture for the modesty panel, coupled with judicious post-processing use of Photoshop's blur brush. I still had issues with the amount of refraction displayed -- but I've since discovered that can be corrected by hand-editing the MTL file.
On the other hand, I much prefer your bathing model -- heels and all -- to the one I eventually used.
OKHoff -- would these images be considered harmful matter?
maz
