One of the most wonderful things about our honeymoon apartment, apart from the fact that it was in Barbados, was its bathroom. Or rather, its master bathroom, it having two.
I may have mentioned before that our flat in London is small. Just how small was emphasised by this bathroom, which was bigger than our bedroom. It had a built-in wardrobe thrice the size of our tiny little thing, a walk-in shower, hot tub, separate toilet, and two sinks in a huge vanity unit with more storage than I would know what to do with. With stone coloured tiles, and dark wood doors and woodwork, it was a lovely bathroom.
But whilst the hot tub was nice, the bit that blew me away was the shower. It was a generous size – easily big enough for two (I hope that’s not TMI!). But it had something I’ve never seen before, but which I now know I want in my future bathroom: five shower heads. Yup, that’s right. Five.
The first was a normal shower head, positioned exactly where you would expect it, raining water down upon your head. Then there were a pair of smaller heads at about chest height, and another pair at about hip height. All five were controlled by a rather mysterious rotating handle which change the flow of water from a traditional shower to a full-on drench-o-rama. It really was truly a magnificent shower.
I hate to think how much water it would take, but as I’m intending to both gather rainwater and recycle water in our future house, I’m not too fussed about it. Most of the water that we use is only slightly dirty when we throw it away, so there’s no good reason why it can’t be cleaned up and reused. Whilst “reduce” may be the first of the three Rs, water is not something worth skimping on when a bit of ingenuity can make it potable again. (I’ll cover all that in future posts as I do my water research.)
Another item of bathroom furniture that has become a lot more important to me is my bath. I didn’t used to care much for baths, prefering a quick shower to a long soak. As a child we had weekly baths, every Sunday night whilst The Money Programme was on. I had a tendency to be less dirty than my brother, so I generally got to go in the bath first and then my brother got my water, topped up with some hot.
Our bathroom then was tiny, and the bath was an enamel thing that took up most of the available space. The water was heated by our Parkray coal fire, until dad installed an immersion heater, but even then sometimes the hot water would run out.The fire didn’t have enough oomph to heat the water and the radiators, so the bathroom was a bit nippy in the winter and I would dry off as fast as I could, get into my nightdress and go and huddle with the cats by the fire to get warm again.
As soon as we got a shower fitted, I used that instead, and have quite happily stuck to showers ever since, with only the occasional bath to relax.
Things change, though, and now I yearn for a decent bath. It was a year before we used the bath – as a bath instead of a shower – in our current flat, thus discovering that the overflow wasn’t plumbed in at all. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to take a bath, but because it is so tiny that you just can’t relax in it. I can’t straighten my legs out, so rather than relaxing in a nice, calming bath, you end up dipping in and out so quickly that it seems pointless spending all that time actually drawing the water in the first place.
Now, though, I want a bath that I can fill full of Radox and take a good soak in whilst Kevin reads to me. I love being read to, and I love reading to others, so one of the little rituals we’ve settled upon is that we read to each other before we go to bed. It’s a nice way to unwind and put ourselves in a nice, sleepy frame of mind. Indeed, the other night, Kevin nodded off mid-sentence in a shameful display of endearing cuteness.
What better way to extend that ritual than to sit in the bath whilst Kevin reads? Currently, that means he has to sit on the loo lid whilst I scrunch myself up and try not to dislocate anything doing so. No, I’d much rather have a nice big bath with a comfy chair next to it.
Indeed, I’m even thinking of having a bath in the bedroom. The first time I saw that on TV I couldn’t believe that someone would do that – it seemed completely stupid and irrational. But I’m coming round to the idea of having a bath in the corner of the bedroom with a nice comfy chair next to it.
The two drawbacks I see are that it’s easier to keep the air temperature high in a bathroom, so that you don’t have the problem of your submerged half being warm whilst the rest of you gets goosebumps. The other issue is ensuring that the floor doesn’t get wet. Whilst you don’t want a bathroom-like floor in your bedroom, you also don’t want soggy carpets either.
Another pet peeve with baths, though, is the thermal properties of the bath itself. Our old enamel thing used to suck the heat out of the water with fearsome speed. I’d get it to just the right temperature that it would be comfortable to get into, and just as I started to settle down, the water would go cold. Indeed, I complained about this so much that when dad had to re-plumb the bathroom he wound a few coils of hot water pipe around the underside of the bath to try and warm it up a bit.
Freestanding baths are gorgeous, but if they are made of metal they’re going to be colder than a witch’s icecubes. I suspect I’d be willing to forgo the sleek aesthetic of the freestanding tub so that I could have something to hide the lagging.
But whatever we decide on, I’m going to enjoy thinking about and designing our future bathroom, in anticipation of all that luxuriating.
