I never take a bath at home. I have one, of course, but it would never occur to me to use it. My bathroom is one of those perfectly functional, windowless rooms with shoebox dimensions that Londoners accept as standard. It isn’t somewhere you’d fill with Buly scented candles and lose yourself in a couple of hours of Nancy Mitford.
When I’m in a hotel, however, the bath is everything. A hotel room without one, even if it has the most extravagant rain shower, is a disappointment. A bath becomes a fundamental luxury, particularly if it’s freestanding, claw-footed, and has a ledge for putting wine on. It’s a day’s entertainment, and should give you the chance to experience something more than you can at home. Case in point: the Oak Suite at Foxhill Manor has two slipper tubs next to one another, looking out onto a Cotswolds idyll, with a table in between for a champagne bucket. You almost definitely don’t have that in your house.
Design in hotel bathrooms is changing as fast as the global climate. Bathrooms have got bigger while bedrooms generally have not. Karim Rashid is one of the most future-thinking interior designers in the world. He created the Baiyoke Sky hotel in Thailand and is currently working on B-Apart in the Netherlands. His work looks like Stanley Kubrick sci-fi on magic mushrooms, but he wants to create a mood as much as a Kodak moment with each bathroom.
“It has become the sacral spiritual refuge for mental health in hotels in the last few years,” he says. “The trend for larger bathrooms, and a more contemporary aesthetic, is due to the need for rejuvenation, privacy and slowing down. I think the trend will be towards a look that is super clean, also soft and geometric, with no corners and no discomfort. It should be technological yet essential. My dream bathroom would give you updates on your health and advise on vitamins or herbs, etc. I would like a smart floor and mirror in my bathroom that would perpetually give me health and beauty diagnostics.”
Every hotel has its own identity, and Rashid’s acid-pink high-tech extravaganzas aren’t for everyone. Russell Sage created the eccentric Victoriana of Fife Farms in the Highlands, and has been refreshing the classic Goring in London for the past 15 years. Interestingly, the Goring was the first hotel in the world to offer en-suite bathrooms for every guest, back in 1910.
