James Duncan is a Decorati Manufacturer and author of “A Well Traveled Aesthetic.”
My grandfather, who was a boy in the early 20th century, told the story of how his family rented a farmhouse in the French countryside. As they planned to stay for a few years, his father asked if he could install indoor plumbing at his own expense. The farmer let him know in no uncertain terms that he considered going to the bathroom in the house to be disgusting. He would give his permission ...
only on the condition that the toilet be removed before they left the house!
Although this took place less that a century ago, it seems a world away from a contemporary America where real estate agents tell us that a luxurious en suite bathroom is one of the most important selling points of a house. And yet one could argue that Americans retain a deep cultural squeamishness about having a toilet in the house by the language they use. While an English guest at a dinner party would ask to use “the toilet” or if they were more posh “the loo” (see Debrett’s U & non-U Revisited), American dinner guests would ask to use “the bathroom,” although it would certainly be a breech of etiquette if they actually took a bath.
The first known private baths and toilets were built in Pakistan in 2800 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans also had indoor baths and toilets with running water.
The frequency of bathing has varied over the centuries. In medieval times people washed frequently for fear of the black plague. Some castles had hot and cold running water. But then indoor bathing greatly declined during the sixteenth century as water was thought to carry disease. Furthermore, Puritanism taught that the naked body was sinful and that washing the body had connotations of depraved sexuality! By the 18th century bathrooms were still rare and running water (when found) was cold and ran only to the kitchen.
Until the 19th century, people tended to wash only their hands and feet regularly, using perfume to cover up body odors. The famous 19th century dandy Beau Brummell rejected perfumes and started the fashion among aristocrats to bathe daily. They washed in basins in their bedrooms or in a portable hip bath in a dressing room with water carried up from the basement by servants.
Toilets were found at the back of the house or more commonly in outhouses at the end of the garden.
By the mid 19th century technological developments and a rising concern about sanitation led to a middle class revolution in indoor plumbing including the flush toilet. The most popular model was developed by Thomas Crapper in 1861, who made a fortune from his invention, but lived to see his name memorialized by the expression “to take a crap!” While toilet paper was commercially available in the United States by 1860, until much later the British used scraps of paper bags and old envelopes!
Home management books in the latter 19th century suggested that the bath and sink be placed in the dressing room and that the toilet be located in a separate room. And so the dressing room was renamed the bathroom. That arrangement is still often found in Britain and France today. By the mid 1880s when the seals and the flushing mechanisms on toilets were perfected and no longer smelled bad, they were moved into bathrooms.
Once the dressing room was plumbed with hot water, wallpaper was varnished and floors were tiled. More modest houses used the newly invented linoleum (1860). Such protection was especially necessary after the 1890s when showers became common. The early models had attached boilers which generated a large amount of steam and were liable to explode.
While these 19th century technological innovations led to the creation of the basic bathroom as we know it, it wasn’t until the 1920s with the emergence of Art Deco that the modern bathroom of sleek glass, mirror, porcelain and chrome emerged. Once this happened, the bathroom became an object of beauty, not just for the rich, but for the middle classes as well.
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