Meddling with Metals

The next few days will be some invisible goodness - the HVAC system is in place and the plumbing and electric are coming next week. So while that happens more-or-less behind the scenes, I can agonize over our choice of metal finish in the bathroom.

Our default metal choice since we've lived in our house has been brushed nickel, with the only exceptions being things we inherited from the previous owners, like our rubbed bronze curtain rod and sunroom double doors, and the polished chrome faucets in the main bathroom (that we then used to match with other things we added, like light switch plates and vanity lamps). But since for this bathroom we're starting from scratch, we can choose what we want. Brushed gold and black are clearly having a moment. And while black is too dark for the look we want, we're very drawn to the matte gold that is so *in* right now. In fact, it comes with the vanity we're planning to get, whether we want it or not:

So what's the problem? Well, there are a LOT of fixtures in our future bathroom, which means a lot (too much?) gold. In addition to the vanity faucets and drawer pulls, we plan to have our recessed mirrors framed in our metal of choice (not blue like in the above picture). Something like this:

We are DEFINITELY not doing the skull-busting unframed beveled edge mirror like we have in our upstairs bathroom. I regret that choice daily as we all struggle not to literally cut our heads open. There's also all the hardware that will go into our shower, which will have a similar set-up to our upstairs bathroom--a handheld shower head on a slide-rail with a metal hose (the shower being a choice that I loved, and I'm bummed that the links I posted in 2012 only lead to Kohler now, and not to specific products because I would definitely just buy them again). And then we have...the towel warmer.

Yes, we're going European style with a towel warmer, a feature I love in every airbnb or hotel that has one. And here's the biggest problem. Do we want what would essentially look like giant gold stripes on our wall, when our default preference is for silver? That's a LOT of gold, and it's hardwired in and not something we would want to replace in a few years if we get bored with gold. And finally--turns out gold (technically brass) is hard to find. We'd pay a much higher premium, assuming we could find it at all. I can't even find a good stock photo, so here is what we're getting, in brushed nickel:

Then we have to decide how much everything needs to match. What about door pulls for our pocket doors? What about the powder room across the hallway, since we're trying to keep all design elements the same to make sure that they feel like one space? That would mean the toilet paper holder, the flusher, and the faucets to the small sink in there. 

Or do we mix and match? How do we make this feel like a coherent whole? The "easy" button is to just ignore the included gold hardware for the vanity and stick with brushed nickel. It would look something like this (ignore the "out of stock" sign, since this isn't the exact one we're getting). Not as much pop, but certainly safer all around:

Or we could do gold for the vanity wall (vanity, faucets, mirrors, and vanity lights) and brushed nickel elsewhere? That feels like it could look accidental and haphazard. As always, my fashionable friends have lots of great ideas, so please share yours!

Edited to add - now that we're seeing how truly hard it is to find the right color gold in a towel rack and how some other things are odd in other ways (some mirrors are edged in black but not gold, etc.) AND having found this article, we're thinking that a blend of black and gold (maybe even with a light fixture that blends both) might be the best approach here, so we can stick to gold where we want to and use black when we can't. Thoughts?

While we're on the topic of metal, the roof brand we'll be using changed to PAC-CLAD and we have a new selection of colors to choose from. We were surprised that our slates, which look so consistent on our roof, are quite variegated, leaving us a lot of choices. Still, we're nothing if not a cool gray family, so we went with charcoal (third row down, second from left) rather than some of the warmer grays like the one next to it and the one diagonally down to the right). I'm excited to see what it will look like once it's in place.