Style Over Safety Part II: More on What’s Wrong with Today’s Bathroom Design – GreenBuildingAdvisor

Building Matters

From toilet placement to grab bars and bidet seats, better bathroom design can improve safety, hygiene, and comfort—especially as homeowners age

In the previous article, Style Over Safety: What’s Wrong with Today’s Bathroom Design, we looked mainly at tubs and showers. However, there are many issues with sinks, toilets, and basic bathroom layouts that are often ignored or overlooked.

Toilets are a failure of design and function from first principles. Whoever thought it was a good idea to use expensive drinking water to wash away poop? Historically, we didn’t; we used the smelly outhouse out back, quite separate from where we washed with water, which we carried from the pump, often to a washstand in our bedrooms. We bathed in the kitchen, where the hot water was. Why did we sit on benches with a hole in them in the West, when people in the East would squat? And once we got toilets, whoever decided that it was a good idea to put them in the same room as where we wash?

The fact is nobody really planned any of this; it just happened. When water was piped to houses, it went to the kitchen, and then to sinks built into washstands in the bedrooms. Soon, people realized they could stay inside to poop using a toilet; in Europe and in existing houses in North America, toilets were stuck in closets or under the stairs. They weren’t just toilets; they were often multifunctional devices. But so much of America was being built from scratch, and a standard bathroom quickly evolved. Ellen Lupton and J. Albert Miller in The bathroom, the kitchen, and the aesthetics of waste:

“The small size of the standard bathroom reflects the ambivalence which has attended bodily functions and maintenance in American culture. The bathroom is at once the most and least important room in the house; it accounts for a large percentage of…