My first bathroom

The fourth in an occasional series about necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, cloakrooms, restrooms, thrones, washrooms, and bathrooms.

Occasionally one hears of bathrooms being described as retreats or sanctuaries, as they may well be for many people. Such descriptions suggest a room spacious enough to include a bathtub larger than the white enameled puddle that is standard in many a bathroom across this land.

I was raised in a house with a bathroom that had the usual appointments for the time - a capacious, claw-footed cast iron tub, a high tank, pull chain toilet pot and a white stoneware sink with chrome taps, no shower and no heating, the only ventilation being an open window. Lighting was an unshaded bulb hanging overhead. Times change, but what the experience of my childhood bathroom has left me with, besides a dislike of unheated bathrooms, with walls running with condensation, is a desire for the (relative) austere and forthright ablution.

In the 1970s, in a mild fit of DIY, I bought some brightly colored wallpaper, an orange plastic bogroll holder to match, peach gloss for the door, and a kerosene heater. I'd had enough of the damned, damp, marrow-sapping chill that very closely matched the dour climate of Lancashire.

There were two coal-burning fireplaces in that house - one in the living room and one, in its never-used-black-leaded purity, in my grandparents bedroom. A situation unimaginable to many in this day and age - the only heating came from one coal fire. The rest of the house went without heat.

Hot water, of which there was plenty in winter, came from a tank that sat behind the back wall of the fireplace. This arrangement had two disadvantages. First, a lot of hot water had to be drained when the thunderous noise made by boiling water came from the fireplace; second, in winter, if the fire was not banked overnight, the water in the tank froze – only to burst when a fire was lit. One advantage was that the hot water storage tank was kept in a closet in my grandparents' bedroom and, being uninsulated, warmed the closet, actually called the "airing cupboard," the place to let newly ironed linens "air" - that is, dry off completely.

Luckily for me, my grandmother loved to wash and iron, and there was plenty of hot water for washing.  Water from the kitchen tap was transferred by bucket to the washing machine, if machine is what one could call it. The first washing machine I ever saw my grandmother use – and if my memory serves me right it was the first she ever owned – was basically a copper kettle, heated by a gas ring underneath, with a lid incorporating a hand-turned agitator, a wringer for squeezing out the water, and a tap low down for draining the water into the bucket that had filled it. My grandmother kept that washer for years.

What I didn't realize then was that I was watching a method of washing that was pure nineteenth-century – if not earlier. It is not easy to imagine nowadays, but washday could last effectively all week, especially if the household was large. My grandmother's washday was Monday, the traditional day for beginning the wash, and seemed to take a whole day. First, as I say, the copper was filled, clothes washed and wrung, the copper emptied of suds, clean water put in at least twice for rinsing, then filled a third time for "bluing" the whites. All went to hang in the garden on a clothes line that always had to be wiped clean of soot (these were the days before any clean-air legislation) before anything was hung. Freezing weather did not diminish the need for washing and hanging out - I remember being charmed by my grandfather's shirt being so stiff from the cold I could hold it in front of me like a board.

Ironing, before she bought an electric iron in the 1960s, was with one made of iron, heated on the stove, tested with a wet finger and – though I don't know why – smoothed on a bar of soap.

As I say, times change, for many years later the Celt and I have a Miele automatic, front-loading washing machine and dryer (still in the kitchen, but that is a story for another day.) Ironing? We both can iron a shirt better than any laundry and even sheets and pillowcases have been known to be dashed with a smoothing iron.

Oh yes... back to the bathroom. I don't need my bathroom to be a sanctuary, retreat or gallery for family photos. What I need is functional, clean and handsome: good light to shave by, a powerful shower, a warm-when-needed floor, and good fresh towels. Pots, potions and other talismans against the evil eye of aging, out of sight in drawers, towels stacked on shelves and other surfaces clear as can be. Get in, get done, get out, get on with the day.

Clean and handsome in our case means travertine floor, largish shower, frameless glass shower doors, Venetian plaster walls that live well with travertine and are sympathetic to early-morning skin, a simple large mirror, two plain sconces and a really big, framed 1970s poster by Rene Gruau advertising Dior's Au Sauvage. Oh, and no tub!

Photo of Charles de Beistegui's bathroom at the Villa Labia, Venice, by Gianni Berengo-Gardin for an essay published in The World of Interiors, April 1987.

Pink

The third in an occasional series about necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, cloakrooms, restrooms, thrones, washrooms, and bathrooms.

Answering a comment from JCB on Friday's post I had one of those paralyzing moments when the eye turns inwards, reality is berthed, and the topography of the past is the byway one takes - the kind of situation when on a too-familiar journey in the automobile there's little recollection of how one arrived at the destination - the body on one journey, the mind on another.

JCB had written that she was comforted to know someone else's reading list is just as randomly diverse as her own, and in reply I was going to mention how I'd grown up in a house devoid of books and there I was, back in my grandparent's living room seeing my grandfather, a fag between his lips, reading the local newspaper - "the pink" as it was known. And pink it was, the paper of that daily with its list of football league scores - vital information in a Lancashire cotton and coal town where winning the pools was an undying hope - a town, deep in a valley, where "thee" and "thou" were still used in its dialect, as were Norwegian words left over from the Viking raids of the 8th century. A town where working men's clubs, nonconformist chapels, darts and dominos, whippet racing, pigeon fancying, growing sweetpeas, joining brass bands and coal miner's choirs that sent Jerusalem, the Hallelujah Chorus and Abide With Me thundering out over the cobblestones, enriched the lives of those staunchly socialist men and women - lives that had been portrayed a generation earlier in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, and in my youth in the films of the 1960s.

In this slide down the valley slopes of memory I have come a long way from my original intention of post about bathrooms so let me give you one more memory. My grandfather had cousins in the next town, who lived in a terraced (row) house without an internal bathroom. In the paved, walled area - the backyard - behind the house were two stone-built outhouses. One held coal, the other, the long-drop, or privy. I had never seen a water closet without a flushing mechanism and was totally charmed by the idea that not only was there a slate slab where wood should have been (hell-on-earth to sit on in winter, I would think), but also that the only way to flush it was to wait for the kitchen sink to be drained into it. I say I was charmed, but I waited till I got home, I seem to remember!

So via the flushing mechanism of my mind, I offer you the bathroom belonging to this house - I'm not necessarily continuing my theme of blue in decorating but I couldn't not show it.

Photographs by James Mortimer from article written by Elspeth Thompson for The World of Interiors, March 1994.

Blue

The second day of a self-indulgent indulgent week when I post about the color blue in decoration and, coincidentally, the third in an occasional series about bathrooms. I don't have a lot to say about it - my enthusiasm for blue has already been declared - but, as with the room yesterday by Mark Hampton, I could roost very comfortably here.

Let me give you a taste of Christopher Gibbs' text about the owner of the house, Piers von Westenholz.

"Piers and his friends looked back before the baleful blanching-out of Syrie Maughm, the thoughtless dragging, stippling and obliterating of architectural framework, the revolt against historicism, the ghastly chic of Evelyn Waugh's Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust, the litter of tawdry gewgaws and 'antiques' restored beyond any interest, quality or atmosphere.

"It was time to return to old England, England before the Industrial Revolution and mass manufacturing spawned that nadir of designed depravity, belle époque. They searched out, dusted down, revived and refreshed the true orthodoxy, anchored firmly this side of the Channel, grounded in ancient harmonies, preserved in our architectural traditions, and in the use of materials felled or mined in our islands.

"What was despised by the taste-makers of the past decades - oaky gothick, Tudorbethan, the sternly architectural and archaeological - is cherished by Westenholz. These foundations are garnished by often earlier, more familiar pieces - painted, or in mahogany, walnut, even satinwood - and by drawings, paintings and sculptures by his friends and contemporaries such as Book Bantock, Rory McEwan and Nigel Waymouth .... "

A fine piece of writing that, despite the patriotism, is full of heartfelt detestation of modern manufacturing and it's consequences.

Photo by Jonathan Pilkington for an article written by Christopher Gibbs for The World of Interiors, October 1997.

Kilroy was here

The second in an occasional series.

There are a few times in a day, moments of repose, when, subdued by the animal but not in any way diminished - more doing what is necessary - one can really focus. Not, I mean, focus on the ramparts to be scaled, the bewitching hussy down the the hall, or even the astringent rejoinder that now will never be made, but simply on the task in hand.

So it was, in a moment of relaxation, when I first saw the mosaic decoration on the walls of this Folies Bergère gents, the inner eye fixed and kinships convened on eggshell inlay lacquer. Pretty obvious connection, you might think - and you'd be right. It's at this point I could bang on about these internal correspondences being the graffiti on our stele, our trophies, our Kilroy was here moments, but that'd wouldn't be any fun at all. Now, would it?

Photo above by Ivan Terestchenko from an article written by Marie-France Boyer for The World of Interiors, December 1993.

Image below Portrait of Madame Agnès by Jean Dunand (polychrome lacquer, eggshell) from The Decorative Arts in France: La Société des Artistes Décorateurs, 1900-1942, by Yvonne Brunhammer and Suzanne Tise, published by Rizzoli New York, 1990.

Conviviality

The first in an occasional series of necessary houses, bogs, WCs, comfort stations, garderobes, gentlemen's powder rooms, heads, johns, ladies' rooms, latrines, lavatories, outhouses, potties, powder rooms, privies, restrooms, thrones, and washrooms.

Each time I lecture on architecture and interiors of ancient Rome and a slide of communal latrinae comes up on screen, a loud and conjoint eeuw goes around the room - as well it might, you may think. Hard as it is for anyone in modern times to imagine sharing one of life's more intimate moments with anyone else, it was apparently not so for our ancestors. Arguably, it is also not so for ourselves given the flimsy partitions separating toilet facilities in many a contemporary building.

This communal lieu begs a question I shall leave you to contemplate.

Photos by Peter Woloszynski from an article authored by Leslie Geddes-Brown in The World of Interiors, March 1994.