The master ensuite has quietly become the least negotiable room in the Kenyan brief — three-bedroom plans without one barely get a second look. It is also a room where folklore runs ahead of drawing: too small and it is a corridor with a shower, too ambitious and it eats the bedroom that justifies it. Here is how the ensuites across our twenty published plans are actually drawn, and the decisions behind them.
The size that works
Across the published catalogue, ensuites run from 3.1 m² — a clean shower, WC and basin serving a guest bedroom — up to 6.9 m² behind the master of a 5-bedroom house. The split is instructive: bungalow masters draw generous ensuites of 5.0 to 6.9 m², while the maisonettes run tighter at 3.5 to 4.4 m² and spend the saved floor on the bedrooms themselves. Those are not aspirations; they are the areas printed on the plans. Below about 3 m² the door, the shower screen and a standing adult start negotiating for the same floor; the square metre between a cramped ensuite and a comfortable one is some of the cheapest comfort in the whole house.
The rules the room must keep
- A window, by rule and by sense. Our plans draw ensuites on external walls with openable windows — mechanical extraction is a supplement in a Kenyan house, not a substitute. A windowless bathroom is a mould farm with good lighting.
- Entered from the bedroom, privately. The ensuite door should not face the bed or announce itself to the room. On our plans it sits behind the sleeping zone, off the bedroom's own circulation.
- On a shared plumbing wall. Wet rooms that share walls share pipe runs, and pipe runs are money. When an ensuite backs onto the family bathroom or the kitchen, the bill notices.
The walk-in closet question
The walk-in closet is the ensuite's usual companion in the brief and its usual casualty in the drawing. It costs floor area that must come from the bedroom or the house, and below about 4 m² it stores less than a well-built wardrobe wall while costing more in doors and circulation. Where the plan is generous — a large master over a maisonette's footprint — it earns its place. On a 50 × 100 bungalow, the honest answer is usually the wardrobe wall, and the square metres go to the room you sleep in.
When all-ensuite earns its bill
Every ensuite added multiplies plumbing, waterproofing, tiling and fittings — the cost lever our pricing page and cost guides keep pointing at. All-ensuite makes sense when the household genuinely lives in parallel: adult children, long-stay guests, a rental wing. Our executive 4-bedroom draws two ensuites plus two shared bathrooms and a guest WC as its balance; the 5-bedroom maisonette carries three. The right count is a decision about your household, priced honestly — which is exactly the conversation to have with the plan and its bill in front of you, not after the plumber has left.
Draw yours around your family
Every plan on this site can be re-briefed: more ensuites, fewer, a WIC where the plan allows it — the drawing regenerates around your ask and re-checks itself against the code rules, ventilation included. Start from the published plan nearest your life, and make the ensuite an outcome of your household rather than a rumour of what buyers want.