The re-engagement of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck has provoked sustained global delight, much needed in this otherwise somewhat bleak post-pandemic period of war and recession. For some of us, no detail is too irrelevant, not even floor plans of houses that they might buy. At one point, TMZ reported that they were in escrow (i.e. at a level of legal commitment) for the Bellagio Estate, which has 10 bedrooms, and, remarkably, 19 bathrooms. We’ve all watched enough episodes of American reality TV shows to know that this is not an anomaly in high-end housing in LA–or indeed Miami, the OC, Dallas or Atlanta–but there is one burning question, which is why? Is it because some people just really, really like bathroom suites? (In the late Paula Yates’ biography she writes about how her father–or the man she thought was her father–collected them.) Or is it because there are occasions when you might find yourself hosting 17 people who all need to be able to shower simultaneously, but separately? Or, and this is also worth considering ,do our trans-Atlantic cousins know something that we don’t? Are more bathrooms a significant life enhancer (as opposed to just increasing the cleaning load)? After all, it was Americans who came up with peanut butter and jam sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies and indeed the internet. But multiple bathrooms?
Brandon Schubert is a UK-based interior designer, but he is Dallas born and bred, and explains “culturally, most Americans of reasonable means would abhor the idea of a family bathroom. At a stretch, where space is limited, you might encounter a Jack and Jill bathroom for adjoining children’s bedrooms, but they largely fell out of favour in houses built after about 1995.” Which leads neatly on to one obvious answer to the discrepancy between Britain and America, which is that we have a somewhat elderly housing stock. While the median age of an American home is 41, more of ours were built pre-1900 than post, i.e. they were built at a time when daily bathing wasn’t a thing. Rewind to Georgian England, and even those who could afford taps and running water still didn’t have bathrooms–instead, bedrooms contained basins on elaborately designed stands. When the 6th Duke of Devonshire made changes to Chatsworth House after he inherited it in 1811, increasing the number of bedrooms to accommodate his love of entertaining, he put in a communal Turkish bath.
Nonetheless, it is entirely possible to make adjustments to old houses–Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, née Mitford, installed 17 individual bathrooms at Chatsworth in the 1950s when she and the 11th Duke moved in, and, more recently, Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham of Salvesen Graham have updated a number of houses to incorporate a larger number of private washing facilities, even if “sometimes this means adapting an existing bedroom.” We are in the process of doing the same in the wreck we moved into nearly two years ago, because seven bedrooms cannot comfortably be served by one bathroom (besides which, both my children always need to go to the loo at exactly the same time), and besides, we didn’t need seven bedrooms. Which leads back to the titular question: is there a magic number, or ratio, we should be aiming for?
Let’s look more closely at those 19 bathrooms in LA. “You have to remember that ‘bathroom’ in American English can been a room with a bath in it, a room with a shower in it, or a room with only a loo in it,” points out Brandon. Then, having already established that “the American standard has become one bathroom per bedroom”, it’s only the other nine that need to be explained. At least one is probably a ‘half bath’, recounts Brandon – i.e. a guest loo. (Can two halves make a whole when it’s bathrooms? We feel that this might be an instance that defies the laws of maths.) Then, suggests Brandon, there are certain rooms that would almost certainly have adjacent bathing facilities–most obviously in a large American house, this would be a gym and both indoor and outdoor pools–which accounts for a further three bathrooms, even six if they’re gender divided, necessary if you’re an avid hoster of a pool parties or invite friends to work out with you. Elizabeth Ghia, a Miami-based interior designer, names other rooms that would ideally have nearby loos so that neither residents nor guests have to traipse down corridors looking for one, she lists the cinema room, the games room (children’s playroom?), the bowling alley, and perhaps even a ‘craft’ room. Then, says Brandon, there’s the staff bathroom “because you might not want your housekeeper and cook using the same WC facilities as your family.” Suddenly, without even trying, we’re up to a possible 16 full bathrooms and six half bathrooms, and the number on the Bellagio estate seems entirely reasonable.
So might this catch on? Nicole and Mary point out that there are often architectural limitations, particularly within historic homes. “We prefer fewer but larger bathrooms,” they say, “so that the bathroom will feel more like a room than a utilitarian space. Often we like to incorporate decorative furniture and soft furnishings.” (It’s a far cry from the monochrome banality of Selling Sunset.) Also, “we don’t necessarily prefer every bedroom to have an ensuite,” they continue. “It can make a house feel like a hotel.” (Regarding Paula Yates and her father’s love of bathroom suites, her parents actually did run a hotel, in Wales.) British friends who have moved to LA, and to a four-bedroom house with five bathrooms (“even the TV room has got an en-suite”) find a couple of them are totally unused; “we’ve got three young children, we’re not running three separate baths for them. And anyway, they like bathing together.” If you’ve been watching the BBC’s Everything I Know About Love, you’ll have seen the four flatmates happily getting ready together for nights out, all crowded in their one bathroom, and potentially envied their intimacy. To which end I’m eventually going to have an armchair in the bathroom that we predominantly use, because I have some of my best conversations with my children while they’re lying in the bath; we’re only putting in an additional such room so that when we have friends to stay, nobody has to queue up awkwardly wearing a dressing gown and holding their toothbrush.
So, to conclude: additional bathrooms as a time-saver in terms of distance walked? Yes. A life-enhancer? We’d say the jury’s out; it’s nice for guests to have their own, and there should definitely be sufficient loos–we’re also not against the idea of a basin in a spare bedroom, which many houses of a certain period have. Really, it depends on your number of swimming pools, gyms, games rooms and bowling alleys. We don’t all aspire to the Bennifer lifestyle – however happy for them we are.
