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By Root 784 0

is beyond the reach of most people, but 24 per cent—almost one in four—of the U.S. houses built in 2005 had three or more bathrooms. And quantity is only the beginning of what Americans want from their bathrooms. In the twenty-first century, these rooms have become the inner sanctum, the place where hedonism, narcissism, over-the-top luxury and hygienic scrupulosity meet. At the end of the nineteenth century, the French found the American bathroom as clinical as an operating theatre. Things began to shift in the 1920s when towel companies such as Cannon and Martex and fixture manufacturers such as Kohler and Crane realized there was money to be made from the newest, smallest room in the house. Cannon supplied several “bathing recipes” that advised a generous use of towels. “Because the first towel absorbs impurities from the skin,” Cannon warned the bather, “it must never (under any circumstances) be used again before washing.” Towels, which had come only in white and white with red or blue borders, now bloomed in pistachio, orange and rose, which coordinated with the new, exotically coloured fixtures. Kohler’s Imperator Bath was available in lavender, and Standard Sanitary made tubs, sinks and toilets in Clair de Lune Blue and Vincennes Orchid.

But the bathroom reached its current sybaritic levels only in the 1990s. Often, it’s no longer the smallest room in the house. The average size of the American bathroom tripled between 1994 and 2004, and it’s not uncommon to sacrifice a bedroom to make an extralarge bathroom. Previously undreamed-of luxuries—oversized tubs that fill in sixty seconds, waterproof plasma TV screens and bathroom scales that calculate muscle/fat ratios—are becoming standard items in high—end bathrooms. Other features hark back to ancient Rome and the golden age of bathing. If your floor, and your wallet, can support it, an 1,800-pound marble tub with animal feet can be had for US$20,000 without fixtures. It actually resembles a sarcophagus more than the bronze individual tubs used in Rome, but the Imperial fantasy is what’s important here. Like the rec rooms of the 1950s, the contemporary bathroom is the space where make-believe is allowed the fullest expression—perhaps a Japanese—style “wet room,” where the shower is not in a cubicle but sprays the whole room, or, for a period look, a four-poster bathtub. It can be a retreat where no one else is welcome, a “meditation room” or a new kind of family room—one the Romans would have understood, a place to reconnect with your family after the stresses of the day are past.

As in the nineteenth century, hotels are leading the way. Once travellers to five-star hotels experience fogless mirrors, a shower that imitates a rainforest downpour and a bathtub built for four, chances are it won’t be long before those amenities are available for the domestic market. Eros plays a prominent part in these hotel designs, as seen in the “romantic getaway” room that features a transparent glass shower in the bedroom. Half of the more than three hundred rooms of the Hotel Puerto America in Madrid, designed by a battery of celebrity architects, have open-plan bathroom-bedrooms. The rooms in one of Montreal’s newest hotels, W, have a wall between the bedroom and bathroom—almost a retro step in some quarters—but only to heighten the naughtiness potential: there is a cutout in the wall, offering what the president of W Hotels, Ross Klein, calls a “voyeuristic opportunity.” He adds, “It’s a sexy transmission between the grooming, bathing and sleeping areas.” The Hotel on Rivington on New York City’s Lower East Side takes the titillation a notch higher with floor-to-ceiling windows in the shower that make it visible to the hotel’s neighbours. (If exhibitionism is not to your taste, the hotel will obscure the window with a plastic film.) These kinds of saucy self-indulgences, applied to what was an everyday chore in the not so distant past, cry out for the appraising eye of a modern Martial: he would sometimes jeer at their vulgarity, and in other moods celebrate their carnal possibilities.