Guide to buying the right toilet seat for your bathroom

After spending a great amount of time and effort in planning out the interiors of your bathroom, choosing the right bathroom fittings plays an important role in adding to the ambiance. Further, the choice of the toilet seat determines the overall look of your bathroom. Whether we talk of design, looks, shapes, or sizes, there are too many options to choose from today. Besides the choice of faucet handles, wash basins, shower tap sets, and more, the right toilet seat needs to enhance the bathroom aesthetics while also being comfortable for your use. So, how do you know which one is right for you?

Don’t worry, we’re here to help!

Most homes have a commode, more commonly referred to as a toilet, along with a toilet seat and a hand shower. While little differing designs, both fixtures do have lids. Within toilets, you’ll have those with an open front or closed front on the seat. You will need to purchase a toilet and seat/lid as a matched set. This ensures that they come in the same exact colour and shade, plus they fit the fixtures you have purchased within the designs for you have a range of shapes.

Let’s look at the most common types of toilet seats available:

Floor Mounted

Floor-mounted toilets are the most common and popular ones used in bathrooms across. However, even such toilet seats come in different types like one-piece toilets, the European water closet, Anglo-Indian closet, or even the back to wall closet.

Wall Mounted

Wall-hung or wall-mounted toilet seats are mounted on a wall with the tank installed in the wall, giving a neater and more minimal finish as compared to the floor-mounted ones. These are less space-consuming, much more easier to clean than the floor mounted toilet seats and are perfect for small spaces.

For choosing any of the above types, you need to keep the following factors in mind:

Rough-In Size

One of the most important factors to keep in mind, while choosing a toilet seat as part of your bathroom fittings is the rough-in size, which is the distance from the wall to the bolts on the floor that’ll be used to install the seat (not the distance from the wall to the bass-board). The most common rough-in size is 12 inches, but some bathrooms have 10-inch or 14-inch rough-ins.

The rough-in size basically gives you an idea as to whether your seat would fit into a given space.

Space

It is important to understand how well the toilet seat would go with the kind of space you have in your bathroom to not make it look extremely cramped or even otherwise. For smaller spaced bathrooms, the wall-mounted would be perfect as it covers less space. The tank is installed in the wall, and all that’s visible is the bowl and flush plate. Needless to say, these types of toilet seats look far more polished and neater than typical two/one-piece toilet seats and take up far less space as well.

Budget

The budget plays a very important role in deciding the kind of sanitaryware you’d like to go for. With coming-of-age technology, there is a vast range of options available to suit your needs according to your budget. From single-piece toilet seats to two-piece ones, you can find quality designs to match your premium looks and different features to go with your bathroom at affordable prices.

Bowl Type

Toilet seat bowls usually come in two different shapes: elongated and round-shaped. Generally, people mostly prefer an elongated seat as compared to a round one and find it more comfortable to use. However, for smaller space issues in bathrooms, the round bowl type serves for better space utilization.

Flush Performance & Water Saving

With more and more people becoming rightfully environmentally conscious over the years, the type of toilet seat that fits you best could change drastically based on the kind of flushing system you’re looking for. A toilet seat equipped with a dual-flush system has a small and a large flush, both consuming roughly 3L and 6L of water respectively. This acts as a means to water saving since you have control over the amount of water you use with every use. There are even interruptible toilet flush cisterns that usually have a button that enables the flush which when pressed again will stop the water. A pressure assist toilet flush uses a water-line pressure or has a fit-in device that creates additional force from air pressure to flush the toilet.

There are options to choose from even from a water conservation perspective today, thanks to technology.

Further, you should also keep an eye out for some additional features when buying your toilet seat:

Family toilet seat – If you have small children, a normal-sized toilet can sometimes be a bit of a struggle for them. There are now smaller toilet sets available that come in handy for kids’ use.
Height – You can get a toilet according to how you’d like to style up your bathroom. For a more traditional look, a high-level toilet would be perfect with the cistern placed high above the pan. For a more modern look, you can go with the wall-hung ones with a concealed cistern.

While there are a lot of other factors which you need to keep in mind while deciding on the toilet seat according to the colors and shades of the bathroom interiors, lighting, etc, these are some of the most important ones. Most toilets last for about 10-15 years at least, so you should definitely consider all the important factors to choose the right one for you!

Vaalve has been working towards creating and delivering some of the best Bathroom experiences for two decades and has a range of premium options for you to choose from. Check out our Sanitaryware collection and make the right choice!