August 12, 2009
I’m dreaming of a white bathroom…
I was watching Escape to the Country the other day when I wondered if Bing Crosby had ever crooned about desirable bathroom fittings. Bear with me on this – there is reason to my madness. I reckon it must be a strangely uninspiring world it is being a bathroom designer. To be fair, if you have genuine design skills, you don’t aspire to cutting edge toilet design. But can you tell me why is it that all bathrooms, everywhere are any colour you can think of – as long as it is white?
Just about every episode you see an example of this dull thinking on those ghastly cheap TV shows about buying houses. Mr Smarmy had found a delightful cottage in the country that appeared to be ticking most of the boxes for Mr & Mrs Smug when oh no…. the bathroom suite was blue!
“I know” said Mr Smug “It looks like it last had a makeover in the 80s”. The inference being that you could rip it all out and buy something much cheaper and nastier in white. Which of course you can – but it begs the question – who on earth dictates style in bathroom fittings? And who actually is mug enough to believe any of it?
Presumably there was a time when all bathroom suites were white and made of cast iron. And taps were silver and all looked the same. Then plastic got invented and things moves on. Soon even low level flushing toilets and panelled baths with nowhere inaccessible for the dust to gather were de rigueur.
Then bathroom designers went really wacky and offered us baths in all sorts of different colours. And boy were we pleased to jump on the coloured bathroom bandwagon – because we were being encouraged to match those coloured suites with garish bathroom fittings in gold or gunmetal and match them with colourful tiles too.
But sadly, as is often the case with such things, we went too far. Tasteful shades of blue, yellow and pink began to be replaced with ever-more outlandish offerings. Some people even went so far as to transform their lives with suites in what I seem to remember was called Avocado. Which is designer-speak for a particularly nasty and dull green. Even diarrhoeal tan brown was the order of the day for some people.
And of course, if the height of sophistication was two sinks in the kitchen… you couldn’t live without a bidet being squeezed in your bathroom.
But my how things have changed. Henry T Ford would be proud of today’s bathrooms. You can have any colour you like as long as it’s white. You can even have retro overhead flush to your toilet… or a strangely shaped bath on legs. Toilets can be square, round or oval… as long as they are white.
One day soon I suspect a daring bathroom designer is preparing to reliance Avocado bathroom suites on an unsuspecting world. And Mr Smug on his lousy TV house buying programme will be sneering condescendingly at white bathroom suites which can be oh so easily changed.
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