Bathrooms (construction)

Ahh, bathrooms. Sanctuary, haven, and totally nonstandardized amenity.

I remember staying in a European-style hotel in Colorado years ago, and being struck by the character of their public bathrooms: each stall was in fact a separate room, with finished drywall, a closing door, and a singular sense of isolation. I'm sure those stalls were larger than some Tokyo apartments. At the time I assumed it was an extravagance born of the grande luxe nature of that particular hotel.

For those of you who don't know, the American variety of standard public bathroom usually involves a series of metal interlocking modular stall walls, just tall enough and low enough to obstruct the view of others in the johns (but not so low that you can't check out your neighbors' shoes, a common female preoccupation). You would most commonly encounter these in airports. They certainly aren't very private, and in fact an occasional conversation can be overheard at work as two colleagues carry on a discussion they might've been having when they came in, or perhaps started up as they saw each other entering.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm working in Europe. Our office bathroom consists of two "rooms" in the style of the hotel I mentioned above. They are uniform in size, and finished to standard building specifications. There's even a light above each stall -- when you close and lock the door (using a full-on door & lock assembly, not just a sliding latch), it's pitch black unless that light is working.

To me this style of bathroom takes up a lot of space and feels very isolated. Then again, when I was back in the US I realized that our style of bathroom stalls are very exposed, and you can quite clearly hear what someone else is "up to" in the next stall. I haven't seen any handicapped-accessible stalls here in Europe, so that appears to be another major difference in standard construction. (I'm used to seeing the oversized, blue-labeled stall at the end of a line in the US.)

Next time: toilet technology, paper products