HOMES by Dominique

05/09/2026

03/09/2026

If we did your kitchen in 2018, you probably know us as McIntosh Interiors.

Before that we were Batherama, then Batherama Design, then McIntosh Interiors, then McIntosh Homes & Interiors, and since last year, Homes by Dominique. Same family, same workshop, same door on Monifieth High Street.

We changed the name because the work had outgrown the old one. What we did not do is tell everyone who had used us before, properly, and that is on us.

So if you have been meaning to ask us back about the bathroom and could not find us, we have not gone anywhere. 18 High Street. Est 1993 is on the sign for a reason.

Were you one of ours under an old name? Say hello, we would like to know.

31/08/2026

Before any of this existed it was a drawing of somebody's real room, awkward corner included.

It is the first thing we hand over and it costs nothing. Not a brochure of other people's kitchens. Your room, with the units where they would go and the reasons for putting them there.

Arguing with a drawing is cheap. Move the sink, lose a tall cupboard, change your mind twice on the Sunday. All of it is a rubber and ten minutes. It becomes a different conversation once the joiner has been.

We listen first, draw second, and commit once. The consultation is free, at the showroom on Monifieth High Street or at your own kitchen table, and the drawn proposal comes back inside a fortnight.

27/08/2026

Two jobs that start the same week do not finish the same week.

Which is why "when could you start" is the question everybody asks and the one that tells you least. A start date on its own is not much use to anybody trying to be ready for a particular month.

Ask when the deciding has to be done by instead. That is the part that moves, and it is something you can get on with this week.

Duller question. Better answer.

24/08/2026

A shelf in a shower tells you when the design happened.

Thought about early, it is cut into the wall and it lines up with the tile courses.

Thought about late, it is a plastic basket hanging off the mixer.

The reason is timing rather than money. A recess like that is framed before the wall is boarded and tanked, and once the tiling starts nobody is cutting a hole in it.

Same goes for the shower controls, the extract fan and every socket in the room. All of it goes in before the walls close up. First fix is where a bathroom is actually decided, and it happens weeks before it starts looking like anything.

20/08/2026

October is probably too late to start asking about a new kitchen or bathroom for Christmas.

Quite a few hurdles sit between a first conversation and a room you are happy with. You choose a layout, then you revise it. After all of that comes the final design, agreement and manufacturing, and only then does the install team arrive on the scene.

The next month or so is about the last opportunity you'll have to visit our showroom on Monifieth High Street. Come and see us in that time and you give yourself the best chance. It does not make December a promise. It makes this a conversation instead of a no.

Is there a date in your head already?

17/08/2026

Somewhere in that bathroom is a horizontal line nobody will ever look at, and it was the hardest part of the job.

Tile goes up to about chest height and paint takes over above it. Which means the tiler and the painter both have to land on exactly the same horizontal, the whole way round a room that is not square, past a door, past a shower enclosure and behind a curved vanity unit.

Herringbone makes it worse, because every panel meeting that line is a cut and a cut edge shows. The trim capping it is doing a job, not just decorating.

Get it slightly wrong and nobody can tell you why the room looks off, only that it does.

This is settled in minutes when one person is running all trades together. Booked separately by the homeowner, it becomes an email nobody answers until Thursday.

13/08/2026

Washing machine at floor level is a habit, not a rule.

Lift it to chest height and you stop bending into it twice a day. The cost is a cupboard, which is a real cost and worth saying out loud. What you buy is the end of kneeling on a cold floor to pull wet sheets out of a drum.

Underneath does not have to be a void either. Make it a drawer, sit the basket in it, and the washing never touches the floor between the machine and the basket.

None of that gets added afterwards. The housing is part of the run, so it is settled when the utility is drawn, along with where the waste and the socket go.

Where does yours live? Most people inherit that spot from whoever plumbed the house rather than from a decision anybody made.

06/08/2026

A downstairs loo is the smallest room in the house and the one every visitor uses.

Hanging the pan off the wall and burying the cistern in a duct behind it costs you floor depth. What it gives back is a floor you can mop in one pass with nothing standing on it, and a ledge along the top of the duct that you were going to have to find room for anyway.

It is more work, not less. The frame is fixed to something solid before a single tile goes on, and the flush plate has to land on a tile joint somebody decided on days earlier.

Small rooms take the longest to draw. Ours usually get drawn twice.

03/08/2026

We're closed from Tuesday the 4th to Wednesday the 12th. The Monifieth showroom door will be locked and nobody will be picking up.

Jobs already running carry on through it. Worth saying out loud, because if you are three weeks into a bathroom, "the office is shut" is not a sentence you want to read on a Tuesday.

Anything sent while we're away gets answered from Thursday the 13th, oldest first.

So if you have been putting off asking about the autumn, send it this week and it will be near the top of the pile.