From a series written for ABC Radio National’s Blueprint for Living. This piece first aired on 4th October 2024. You can listen to it here.

***

If the comfortable kitchen is all about order and accessibility then comfort in the bathroom is about plumbing. The pleasing shape of a bathtub or the perfect design of a tap may add to the overall air of comfort but if the lavatory doesn’t flush or the water doesn’t drain away then the bathroom has failed. It was once the room that no one mentioned. Often because it didn’t actually exist. They only really made it into the home at the end of the nineteenth century. Today they’re often the space that has had, with the kitchen, the most money lavished on it.

The flush toilet was a major innovation. Municipal sewage systems became essential in the growing cities of the new industrial age but even when the home was reliant on septic tanks in the yard, the idea of having the lavatory inside the house without it being foul-smelling was a significant move towards the practical comfort of the home. The flushing toilet was invented in the 1580s by the godson of Queen Elizabeth l, Sir John Harrington, with a cistern that released water into a bowl when you pulled a chain. It didn’t catch on. People seemed to find nothing wrong with chamber pots. Then in 1775 a watchmaker called Alexander Cumming created an S-shaped pipe below the bowl that held water, thereby creating a seal which stopped the odours from the cesspit coming back into the home. Further refinements were made to the flush system itself, so that by the mid 19^th century, sanitary plumbing suppliers, such as the wonderfully-named Thomas Crapper in London, were able to supply relatively fuss-free lavatories to whoever had the money to install one.

Another invention that made life more comfortable was the shower. The first was created by a stove maker called William Feetham in 1767 but this was little more than a basin above your head which released the water when a rope was pulled. That water was then pumped back into the basin, becoming increasingly dirty. More sophisticated models that used clean water and proper drainage became better known in the latter half of the nineteenth century but only in spa hotels where showers using mineral water were part of therapeutic treatments. It was not until the 1920s that the Americans really started incorporating showers in their bathrooms, which explains why the American shower was always held up as the best, with the Australian version a close second. 

Bathrooms were often denigrated until the end of the 19^th century, especially by the upper classes, who had servants, after all, to fill their wash basins and baths and didn’t see the need for a bathroom, especially one that might be shared. When the gorgeously neo-Gothic Midland Grand Hotel opened at St Pancras in London in 1873, there were only 8 bathrooms to serve 300 bedrooms, the belief being that hip baths could be brought to the room as needed. Hot and cold running water was still seen as something worth advertising in hotels well into the 1960s. That the bathroom has become so significant in the modern age is not surprising. An obsession with hygiene and appearance is part of it, certainly, but increased tourism has led to the discovery of different ways of doing things, like the Japanese multifunctional toilet that can even play a tune as you use it, or the luxury of twin basins in hotel bathrooms that people want to replicate at home. While functional comfort does much to bolster psychological comfort, there’s something more primal about bathroom comfort. It’s to do with removing ourselves to the inner sanctum, where we are at our most human and yet our most relaxed. The comfort in our bathroom means we can emerge from it, like those first lungfish taking to land, to face the world anew.