Give your toilet a swirly

Sleek modernist bathrooms might be the fashion these days, but toilet seat artist Tuesday Cohen is not a fan. “White to me is boring,” says Cohen, who has given hundreds of commodes a walk on the wild side with her free-spirited creations, hand-painted in a retro bohemian style.

Cohen, a Hollywood native now living in Pensacola, Fla., painted her first toilet seat in the late ‘90s: a decorative western-themed number with a cowgirl that she installed in her guest bathroom. “I like to make ugly things pretty,” she explains. “That’s why I picked toilet seats. They’re ignored.”

Cohen was soon fielding orders and now figures she’s sold about 600 of the wooden seats, which she sands, primes, paints with acrylics and finishes with several coats of polyurethane. Her colorful designs, which feature such icons as pinup girls and flamingos, tiki figures, horses and jazz themes, retail for about $250 at the Santa Monica boutique Raw Style. The self-trained artist has done numerous commissions, including a Woody Allen seat for “a director who was obsessed.” She also creates a spectrum of other bathroom accessories, including tissue boxes, magazine holders, wood paddle hairbrushes, wastebaskets and even hemp shower curtains.

An artist needs a subject, after all, and why not the WC? “The bathroom is my favorite place in the world,” says Cohen. “Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s they used to have so much pretty stuff in the bathroom. I’m trying to bring that back.”