Thanks both of you for your replies. Therenee: I had not thought of a very long skinny tile as an alternative, will look into that. I like some of the ones that look sort of "influenced" by wood instead of mimics of wood. Lornas: That sounds JUST like what we are talking about. Our house is not even built, I just don't feel like devoting a lot of space to the bathroom, but I want it to feel bigger than it is. I haven't decided if we'll need a glass panel plus a door or try to make do with just a panel, since the whole floor will be tile. Have you been using yours for a while? How much water gets out? Do you have pictures posted anywhere that I can have a look at?

We placed the glass at about the height that the shower head comes out of the wall (which is high as we are super tall folks). Our glass will be 80" above our 6" high curb. When the glass guy came to look (he came when I wasn't there, just with DH- that was worrisome!) he was looking at the top of the door trim, then the top of the recessed cabinets as possible guides- but when DH pointed out dutifully where I wanted it, and why, and where the deco trim was, and the grout lines... he said, Oh, yeah, that works too. But I thought those were all good ideas- it never even occurred to me to match my door trim to my medicine cabinet heights.... like I said, we're tall, the mirrors needed to be high so we could finally see our whole heads without bending our knees ;-)

We got our tile for the second bathroom, and ended up going in a completely different direction. Instead of a large format wall tile and an accent stripe (which is what we did in the other bathroom, as you can see in the picture above), for the second one, we went with a textured semi-glossy white Porcelanosa tile for all the shower walls, and a stacked mosaic in multi-tones (greys and blacks) for the shower floor. Glad that's done, but I'm so tired - I want it to be done! (Aside: the sheetrocker broke the existing cooktop today - by accident of course. I don't care about the cooktop, since we're redoing the kitchen, but we have to live there for 6 weeks before the kitchen cabinets arrive. So now I have to find a cheap cooktop for the interim!)

We went with 76 inch sliding doors that sit on top of a 4 inch shower curb so we're actually 80 inches from the floor. Our old shower was 70 inches and we always had to bend over so that we didn't hit our heads on the frame. We had the shower tiled to the ceiling (8 ft) so I think 70 inch doors would have looked out of place. I paid around $800 for 3/8 inch glass and installation. (local company) We love it!