Reflections on 26 Bathrooms
Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway’s Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London &
Oxfordshire (1985) guides the viewer through 26 different bathrooms
belonging to 26 different individuals, narrated in 26 observations that flow in
accordance with the 26 letters of the alphabet. The short was released in the
same year as A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), and preceded his later
films The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers(1988), and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Here,
Greenway reflects upon the film in an entirely new narration that provides
fresh insights and new anecdotes for the modern viewer.
Edited by Jeremy Schipper
Edited by Jeremy Schipper
A is for A Bathroom
This is an arrogant cheat to get us started.
B is for Bathroom
A sweet and affectionate beginning – a naked mother and child in a warm bath surrounded by domestic comforts including the family dog drinking out of the bidet. There is much evidence that the household includes a working ceramicist.
C is for Cleanliness
An obvious necessity - after all the initial and over-riding excuse for a bathroom. What are bathrooms for?
D is for Dental Hygiene
Teeth cleaning is now ubiquitous in the West – though looking at film of English teeth before the Second World War it can be both surprising and appalling that on the whole English teeth were in a bad state, even a very bad state. Considering which -thinking of human social relations – what of bad breath, halitosis, gum disease – and how did human intimacies – like kissing - work out? And of course did these people with bad teeth really mind? That is unless they had tooth-ache? If walking the street and the kitchen and the bedroom with bad teeth was normal, were they so really bothered about appearances?
My Welsh grandmother had all her teeth out when she was fifteen. Better to have all your teeth out – that way she reasoned, she would never have toothache. Problem solved. She had ten children, twenty-three grandchildren and died aged 103.
Bicycles in the bath in a house that has not so much space to put them anywhere else. My Welsh grandmother is called on again. True to literary form practiced by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, not to say Monty Python – my Welsh grandmother kept her coals in the bath. Her bathroom was cold. No heat upstairs. Better to bathe in the tin-bath in front of the kitchen fire where you could also warm the towels on the stove and pour yourself a cup of tea from the stove-kettle. Not so much privacy on a winter’s night when her parlour was home to the street and neighbours came in unbidden to gossip and the neighbour’s dogs came in to lap at the soapy water. Sometimes the neighbour so fancied a sluice in warm water, she might take off her clothes and since you were only a small child, you had to get out so they could get in. Besides if the bathroom was upstairs it meant three flights of stairs to struggle with the pails of scalding-hot water, splashing out to burn your legs and flood the carpets.
Bathrooms are often nicely echoic – all those flat surfaces and white tiles – so we encourage ourselves to whistle and sing – however badly. The privacy makes us confident that we can sing and loudly and get away with it. Perhaps this man is a rector – he is certainly a Mozart fan. Since indeed rectories were surprisingly the first houses to get bathrooms – rectors were so often so grossly under-employed they had time to think about such things like cleanliness being next to godliness. And no doubt time to decorate these bathrooms with various seaside trophies on sunlit wood surfaces. And hanging their herbs from the bathroom ceiling. The letter D, of course, could also be for delphiniums which are more than prominent in this his-and-hers blue bathroom.
E is for Exercise in the Bathroom
Along with the serving hatch and brown toast and a poached egg and orange juice and a single rose. The bathroom as an extension of the gym – perhaps unusual in 1985 – common enough now in 2019.
F is for Fish
A flagrant cheat taking advantage of what’s offered, though we could perhaps have said F is for fixtures, flannels and fun and flotsam.
G is for a Good Shave
A country bathroom – nicely primitive, obviously so from the conversation that even getting hot water can be a problem. Nicely intimate and comfortable and the expectation of a country thunderstorm. A bit underlit and somewhat gloomy, it is the sort of situation where you might cut yourself, even with a safety razor probably supplied by Gillette. The letter G could be for Gillette.
H is for Hi-Tech
Hi-Tech was still very fashionable as a word and as a context in the London Home Counties in the mid-1980s. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s 1977 Pompidou Centre in Paris had filtered down to be relevant to everyday usage in the small bathrooms of the 1985 London suburbs.
I believe it was the woman in the picture who suggested biting into a cucumber which we took from the house kitchen refrigerator. I was colour co-ordinating again. Bright green lettuce or a green apple would have been equally appropriate but less surreal and certainly less phallic. I remember the space was very small and claustrophobic and we had trouble keeping the cameraman’s reflection out of the mirrors. The rubbery surfaces and monotonous collection of plastic items seem now unsympathetic. I remember that the smell of hot plastic in the small confines heated by the camera lights was not attractive. We were making a point about contemporary design at the expense of comfort.
I is for Italians
-in paper hats. A private memory of a privileged upper-class London lady who talks of jam sandwiches and a homecoming office-husband who has the leisure to sit in warm baths of an afternoon and chat endlessly of local scandals. A tableau of the faux-naïf. The filming threw up all manner of entertaining individuals. This lady with her long legs and languid manner reminded me that before the 1940s, few English citizens had a room with a bath. Mind you few English citizens before the 1840s had a room with a bed. It was probably true also of all European citizens – just look at the catalogue of Dutch paintings of interiors. A bed is a moveable object of furniture shunted about to be where you wanted to sleep.
I admire the compositional spaces of domestic Dutch painters like Vermeer and de Hooch, and often try to find ways to reproduce those delightful see-through views from the room the major space occupies to a view through a door into other rooms or often to the outside world – a view over the street or the canal. My favourite Vermeer is not by Vermeer at all but by Emmanuel de Witte which also curiously looks forward to Mondrian with its square and rectangular patches of light on the floor. Emmanuel was argumentative and shouted at people in churches. When his wife and daughter were arrested for kleptomania one winter, he hung himself from a canal bridge, but the rope snapped and he drowned, his corpse was only discovered when the ice melted eleven weeks later.
Whereas the English might have tacked on a bathroom as the last space to consider when building a house, the Dutch waited till the last minute to add a staircase, which means that Dutch staircases are often like ladders, taking up as little space as possible. I live in a de Klerk house in Amsterdam and the staircases, until you get used to them, can be formidable. You wonder how small children and arthritic elderly ladies manage. No wonder most objects are taken to the top floor by way of a hook and tackle placed permanently on the outside of the front façade.
J is for Jacuzzi
- a name which belonged to an Italian-American family of brothers who grew up in the airplane business making propellors in California. To demonstrate and explain a jacuzzi, we advertised for two volunteers – a man and a woman - to show us how to use one. It was 1985 and not so many people in the UK owned a jacuzzi. They might have seen one in a sex scene in a Californian movie. Few UK citizens knew how to spell the word. I noted down their spellings - jacuzi, jacusi, jackusi, jackyousi, jakusi. Fewer still would know the exotic word’s etymology. Many people answered our advertisement. They were obviously curious to see a jacuzzi demonstrated. There was a small fee and a guaranteed showing on Mainline Channel Four TV and all travel expenses would be paid.
Our chosen man arrived by bicycle. He lived within ten streets of our location. The woman came by bus from an adjacent borough. The location address was in the prosperous Hampstead area, long known to be the locality of writers, painters, intellectuals, and traditionally the home for prosperous middle-class Jews, many of them having escaped Nazi persecution. There were fine views of London from Hampstead’s Primrose Hill, frequently painted by the Pre-Raphaelites and frequently photographed by Bill Brandt. Its inhabitants over the years have included Keats, Freud, Gropius and Henry Moore.
The young man and the young woman undressed and put on offered dressing-gowns. I explained what was required. We left them for ten minutes for a camera crew tea-break and so that they could get mutually acquainted with one another’s nudity. When the camera crew returned to the jacuzzi bathroom not much breaking of the formality had happened. When requested they reluctantly took off their dressing-gowns, two strangers never knowing before of one another’s existence. They sat on the side of the bath, their feet paddling in the warm water. We turned on the water jets and turned on the lights and the camera. The warmth and noise, the bright lights, along with the apparent lack of interest in their nakedness from the crew, relaxed them. They slid into the water. They were soon talking, trading conversation about their bathing habits. We filmed for about an hour and I shot what was wanted. The film on the TV monitor was a film I had made several years before simply on the visual excitements of moving water. The original film was in colour but it was processed in black and white to be in sympathy with the section’s colour coding and plastic environment – TV set, laminated blinds, artificial porcelain. Even the idea of a TV monitor in an English bathroom would have been seen as a novelty in 1985.
Ten months later, I was invited to the North London Borough of Highgate to the christening of this couple’s first child, a boy.
K is for Kira
Alexander Kira, writer and researcher of a must-read book, The Bathroom, was prone to admonish us with our dirtiness and lack of hygiene, informing us that 44% of the population regularly had faecally stained underwear due to poor toilet habits. He was excoriated for dealing with excreta. His method was entirely forensic and antiseptic and the critical antagonism entirely unnecessary, no doubt due to a superior and snobbish attitude towards his enthusiasms.
L is for Lost Soap
Losing the bar of soap in a bath of cloudy water is familiar. The boy makes a thorough and finally successful search whilst his father, a true bathroom enthusiast, rabbits on about archaic tiling.
M is for Mirrors.
Mirrors are in a bathroom, though some may be surprised at their thorough covering of all walls, floors and all ceilings. It can be frustrating that bathroom mirror designers have not paid even more attention to provide the means to adequately see a reflection of your own backside with ease. It surely must be simple to arrange.
N is for Newt
Provocative, surreal, even a comic comment. And not an entirely unexperienced happening.
As a ten-year old I had an emergency when a leaking aquarium forced the takeover of the bathroom basin. My father vowed to turn on the hot tap to get me to remove the creatures. I repeated the visual surrealism in a fiction called The Tulse Luper Suitcases - a fictive history of uranium. This time five amphibians swam with wind-up clockwork toy frogs and a naked man who shivered so much in the cold water it took us half an hour and many hot towels to assist him to recover.
O is for an Open-Air Bathroom
Not much to say really – all is there to be seen. After we had left the premises maybe they put back the goldfish.
P is for Public Baths
A reminder that the private domestic bathroom was not so familiar until the 1950s in England. And your time was limited, only half an hour. No time to wallow. But there were people to clean up after you, and the water was always commendably scorching hot.
Q is for a Quiet Smoke
Nowadays smoking is probably universally banned in most homes. Not necessarily in 1985. And this bathroom seems open to the fresh air.
R is for Reading in the Bathroom
The privacy of a bathroom and often the silence therein is very sympathetic to reading on the loo – English upper-class slang for a lavatory – supposedly derived from a corruption of the cry of 'gardyloo' (from the French regardez l'eau 'watch out for the water'), which was shouted by those emptying chamber-pots into the street from an upstairs window.
Who has not often been occupied by reading on the toilet? Especially when you were a child with reading forbidden literature. Or as adults with stolen newspapers - after which you can use them in lieu of toilet paper. My father prepared sections of newspaper hung on a string for such expediencies which meant more than once you could can catch up on last week’s news. Reading on the toilet could mean resting your elbows on your naked knees to produce red patches and your feet can go to sleep.
S is for the Samuel Becket Memorial Bathroom
I worked with the English painter Tom Phillips on a TV version of Dante’s Divine Comedy but it was in the days of analogue television and it was complicated to embrace the many layers of meaning that that book required and you can understand from his present speech how entertaining a raconteur he was, meaning we were often very slow in getting the work done. I remember we managed to get to Canto 12 of the Inferno before the money ran out. It was winter-time and the water in his pipes often froze and the bathroom became even more unvisitable and Waiting for Godot.
T is for Tiles
Bathrooms must have been a godsend for tile manufacturers across the world. Almost unlimited demand.
U is for Undeveloped Living Space
Country-houses in the London rural suburbs were often 19th century, even 18th century and bathrooms would almost certainly have been converted from some other use. But they often still contained references to open fireplaces, decorated plaster ceilings and the mouldings of bricked-up doors. The idea of keeping books, ornaments, clothes and perishable items was entirely suitable, unsurprisng and delightful in such rooms. The idea of getting such items wet was apparently not alarming to the owners.
The conversions of other customised rooms into bathrooms often involved insufficient or poor or incomplete planning, so condensation, steam, wet floors, water-absorbent surfaces were not infrequent. Inconvenient sure enough for the owner or user, but good for me when I could use such atmospheric effects to trick up the image. And such effects could also assist the modest whose anatomy might be disguised or only partly or dimly seen, though bathroom subjects never seemed to be that uncomfortable or embarrassed or inconvenienced. Often the opposite. Our human subjects were often happy to be seen naked, singing, or cleaning their teeth or cutting their toenails or just lying in the water, quietly contemplating their failures and successes. Bathrooms seemed entirely legitimate places after all to be seen naked. There was no patience with prurience or exhibitionism.
I was always sympathetic, and always fully discussed what I was looking for, and if there were objections or necessary accommodations to be acknowledged, I sincerely do not remember them as any inconvenience or something that made it necessary to change anything important in our aims and ambitions.
V is for Violin Practice
This child was keen to show off a little. Encouraged by his grandparents, he often practised in his parent’s bathroom because of the echo, giving him a bigger sound for the same amount of effort.
W is for Washing the Dog
The dog-washer here is Anne-Louise Lambert who starred in the 1975 Australian feature film Picnic at Hanging Rock and then in a feature film I am responsible for called The Draughtsman’s Contract. I had idly conversed with her about bathrooms and she and her dog happily volunteered. The dog’s name was Gloria. And the window cleaner is a happy accidental extra – to be considered a problem in voyeuristc terms if you consider what usually happens in the intimacy of a bathroom.
X is for Expert on Bathrooms
Apart from a generally amused public audience, we received academic interest from interior designers including Barbara Penner of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. who gave it several opportunities for an airing, and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas who exhibited the film in his 2014 “Fundamentals” Venice Architectural Biennale.
Y is for Youthful Exuberance
Back to children - ideal subjects for a joyous bathroom experience – hardly ever failing to produce our delight in their delight.
And Z is for a Zoological Note
So back to amphibians enjoying a holiday.
This is an arrogant cheat to get us started.
B is for Bathroom
A sweet and affectionate beginning – a naked mother and child in a warm bath surrounded by domestic comforts including the family dog drinking out of the bidet. There is much evidence that the household includes a working ceramicist.
C is for Cleanliness
An obvious necessity - after all the initial and over-riding excuse for a bathroom. What are bathrooms for?
D is for Dental Hygiene
Teeth cleaning is now ubiquitous in the West – though looking at film of English teeth before the Second World War it can be both surprising and appalling that on the whole English teeth were in a bad state, even a very bad state. Considering which -thinking of human social relations – what of bad breath, halitosis, gum disease – and how did human intimacies – like kissing - work out? And of course did these people with bad teeth really mind? That is unless they had tooth-ache? If walking the street and the kitchen and the bedroom with bad teeth was normal, were they so really bothered about appearances?
My Welsh grandmother had all her teeth out when she was fifteen. Better to have all your teeth out – that way she reasoned, she would never have toothache. Problem solved. She had ten children, twenty-three grandchildren and died aged 103.
Bicycles in the bath in a house that has not so much space to put them anywhere else. My Welsh grandmother is called on again. True to literary form practiced by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, not to say Monty Python – my Welsh grandmother kept her coals in the bath. Her bathroom was cold. No heat upstairs. Better to bathe in the tin-bath in front of the kitchen fire where you could also warm the towels on the stove and pour yourself a cup of tea from the stove-kettle. Not so much privacy on a winter’s night when her parlour was home to the street and neighbours came in unbidden to gossip and the neighbour’s dogs came in to lap at the soapy water. Sometimes the neighbour so fancied a sluice in warm water, she might take off her clothes and since you were only a small child, you had to get out so they could get in. Besides if the bathroom was upstairs it meant three flights of stairs to struggle with the pails of scalding-hot water, splashing out to burn your legs and flood the carpets.
Bathrooms are often nicely echoic – all those flat surfaces and white tiles – so we encourage ourselves to whistle and sing – however badly. The privacy makes us confident that we can sing and loudly and get away with it. Perhaps this man is a rector – he is certainly a Mozart fan. Since indeed rectories were surprisingly the first houses to get bathrooms – rectors were so often so grossly under-employed they had time to think about such things like cleanliness being next to godliness. And no doubt time to decorate these bathrooms with various seaside trophies on sunlit wood surfaces. And hanging their herbs from the bathroom ceiling. The letter D, of course, could also be for delphiniums which are more than prominent in this his-and-hers blue bathroom.
E is for Exercise in the Bathroom
Along with the serving hatch and brown toast and a poached egg and orange juice and a single rose. The bathroom as an extension of the gym – perhaps unusual in 1985 – common enough now in 2019.
F is for Fish
A flagrant cheat taking advantage of what’s offered, though we could perhaps have said F is for fixtures, flannels and fun and flotsam.
G is for a Good Shave
A country bathroom – nicely primitive, obviously so from the conversation that even getting hot water can be a problem. Nicely intimate and comfortable and the expectation of a country thunderstorm. A bit underlit and somewhat gloomy, it is the sort of situation where you might cut yourself, even with a safety razor probably supplied by Gillette. The letter G could be for Gillette.
H is for Hi-Tech
Hi-Tech was still very fashionable as a word and as a context in the London Home Counties in the mid-1980s. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s 1977 Pompidou Centre in Paris had filtered down to be relevant to everyday usage in the small bathrooms of the 1985 London suburbs.
I believe it was the woman in the picture who suggested biting into a cucumber which we took from the house kitchen refrigerator. I was colour co-ordinating again. Bright green lettuce or a green apple would have been equally appropriate but less surreal and certainly less phallic. I remember the space was very small and claustrophobic and we had trouble keeping the cameraman’s reflection out of the mirrors. The rubbery surfaces and monotonous collection of plastic items seem now unsympathetic. I remember that the smell of hot plastic in the small confines heated by the camera lights was not attractive. We were making a point about contemporary design at the expense of comfort.
I is for Italians
-in paper hats. A private memory of a privileged upper-class London lady who talks of jam sandwiches and a homecoming office-husband who has the leisure to sit in warm baths of an afternoon and chat endlessly of local scandals. A tableau of the faux-naïf. The filming threw up all manner of entertaining individuals. This lady with her long legs and languid manner reminded me that before the 1940s, few English citizens had a room with a bath. Mind you few English citizens before the 1840s had a room with a bed. It was probably true also of all European citizens – just look at the catalogue of Dutch paintings of interiors. A bed is a moveable object of furniture shunted about to be where you wanted to sleep.
I admire the compositional spaces of domestic Dutch painters like Vermeer and de Hooch, and often try to find ways to reproduce those delightful see-through views from the room the major space occupies to a view through a door into other rooms or often to the outside world – a view over the street or the canal. My favourite Vermeer is not by Vermeer at all but by Emmanuel de Witte which also curiously looks forward to Mondrian with its square and rectangular patches of light on the floor. Emmanuel was argumentative and shouted at people in churches. When his wife and daughter were arrested for kleptomania one winter, he hung himself from a canal bridge, but the rope snapped and he drowned, his corpse was only discovered when the ice melted eleven weeks later.
Whereas the English might have tacked on a bathroom as the last space to consider when building a house, the Dutch waited till the last minute to add a staircase, which means that Dutch staircases are often like ladders, taking up as little space as possible. I live in a de Klerk house in Amsterdam and the staircases, until you get used to them, can be formidable. You wonder how small children and arthritic elderly ladies manage. No wonder most objects are taken to the top floor by way of a hook and tackle placed permanently on the outside of the front façade.
J is for Jacuzzi
- a name which belonged to an Italian-American family of brothers who grew up in the airplane business making propellors in California. To demonstrate and explain a jacuzzi, we advertised for two volunteers – a man and a woman - to show us how to use one. It was 1985 and not so many people in the UK owned a jacuzzi. They might have seen one in a sex scene in a Californian movie. Few UK citizens knew how to spell the word. I noted down their spellings - jacuzi, jacusi, jackusi, jackyousi, jakusi. Fewer still would know the exotic word’s etymology. Many people answered our advertisement. They were obviously curious to see a jacuzzi demonstrated. There was a small fee and a guaranteed showing on Mainline Channel Four TV and all travel expenses would be paid.
Our chosen man arrived by bicycle. He lived within ten streets of our location. The woman came by bus from an adjacent borough. The location address was in the prosperous Hampstead area, long known to be the locality of writers, painters, intellectuals, and traditionally the home for prosperous middle-class Jews, many of them having escaped Nazi persecution. There were fine views of London from Hampstead’s Primrose Hill, frequently painted by the Pre-Raphaelites and frequently photographed by Bill Brandt. Its inhabitants over the years have included Keats, Freud, Gropius and Henry Moore.
The young man and the young woman undressed and put on offered dressing-gowns. I explained what was required. We left them for ten minutes for a camera crew tea-break and so that they could get mutually acquainted with one another’s nudity. When the camera crew returned to the jacuzzi bathroom not much breaking of the formality had happened. When requested they reluctantly took off their dressing-gowns, two strangers never knowing before of one another’s existence. They sat on the side of the bath, their feet paddling in the warm water. We turned on the water jets and turned on the lights and the camera. The warmth and noise, the bright lights, along with the apparent lack of interest in their nakedness from the crew, relaxed them. They slid into the water. They were soon talking, trading conversation about their bathing habits. We filmed for about an hour and I shot what was wanted. The film on the TV monitor was a film I had made several years before simply on the visual excitements of moving water. The original film was in colour but it was processed in black and white to be in sympathy with the section’s colour coding and plastic environment – TV set, laminated blinds, artificial porcelain. Even the idea of a TV monitor in an English bathroom would have been seen as a novelty in 1985.
Ten months later, I was invited to the North London Borough of Highgate to the christening of this couple’s first child, a boy.
K is for Kira
Alexander Kira, writer and researcher of a must-read book, The Bathroom, was prone to admonish us with our dirtiness and lack of hygiene, informing us that 44% of the population regularly had faecally stained underwear due to poor toilet habits. He was excoriated for dealing with excreta. His method was entirely forensic and antiseptic and the critical antagonism entirely unnecessary, no doubt due to a superior and snobbish attitude towards his enthusiasms.
L is for Lost Soap
Losing the bar of soap in a bath of cloudy water is familiar. The boy makes a thorough and finally successful search whilst his father, a true bathroom enthusiast, rabbits on about archaic tiling.
M is for Mirrors.
Mirrors are in a bathroom, though some may be surprised at their thorough covering of all walls, floors and all ceilings. It can be frustrating that bathroom mirror designers have not paid even more attention to provide the means to adequately see a reflection of your own backside with ease. It surely must be simple to arrange.
N is for Newt
Provocative, surreal, even a comic comment. And not an entirely unexperienced happening.
As a ten-year old I had an emergency when a leaking aquarium forced the takeover of the bathroom basin. My father vowed to turn on the hot tap to get me to remove the creatures. I repeated the visual surrealism in a fiction called The Tulse Luper Suitcases - a fictive history of uranium. This time five amphibians swam with wind-up clockwork toy frogs and a naked man who shivered so much in the cold water it took us half an hour and many hot towels to assist him to recover.
O is for an Open-Air Bathroom
Not much to say really – all is there to be seen. After we had left the premises maybe they put back the goldfish.
P is for Public Baths
A reminder that the private domestic bathroom was not so familiar until the 1950s in England. And your time was limited, only half an hour. No time to wallow. But there were people to clean up after you, and the water was always commendably scorching hot.
Q is for a Quiet Smoke
Nowadays smoking is probably universally banned in most homes. Not necessarily in 1985. And this bathroom seems open to the fresh air.
R is for Reading in the Bathroom
The privacy of a bathroom and often the silence therein is very sympathetic to reading on the loo – English upper-class slang for a lavatory – supposedly derived from a corruption of the cry of 'gardyloo' (from the French regardez l'eau 'watch out for the water'), which was shouted by those emptying chamber-pots into the street from an upstairs window.
Who has not often been occupied by reading on the toilet? Especially when you were a child with reading forbidden literature. Or as adults with stolen newspapers - after which you can use them in lieu of toilet paper. My father prepared sections of newspaper hung on a string for such expediencies which meant more than once you could can catch up on last week’s news. Reading on the toilet could mean resting your elbows on your naked knees to produce red patches and your feet can go to sleep.
S is for the Samuel Becket Memorial Bathroom
I worked with the English painter Tom Phillips on a TV version of Dante’s Divine Comedy but it was in the days of analogue television and it was complicated to embrace the many layers of meaning that that book required and you can understand from his present speech how entertaining a raconteur he was, meaning we were often very slow in getting the work done. I remember we managed to get to Canto 12 of the Inferno before the money ran out. It was winter-time and the water in his pipes often froze and the bathroom became even more unvisitable and Waiting for Godot.
T is for Tiles
Bathrooms must have been a godsend for tile manufacturers across the world. Almost unlimited demand.
U is for Undeveloped Living Space
Country-houses in the London rural suburbs were often 19th century, even 18th century and bathrooms would almost certainly have been converted from some other use. But they often still contained references to open fireplaces, decorated plaster ceilings and the mouldings of bricked-up doors. The idea of keeping books, ornaments, clothes and perishable items was entirely suitable, unsurprisng and delightful in such rooms. The idea of getting such items wet was apparently not alarming to the owners.
The conversions of other customised rooms into bathrooms often involved insufficient or poor or incomplete planning, so condensation, steam, wet floors, water-absorbent surfaces were not infrequent. Inconvenient sure enough for the owner or user, but good for me when I could use such atmospheric effects to trick up the image. And such effects could also assist the modest whose anatomy might be disguised or only partly or dimly seen, though bathroom subjects never seemed to be that uncomfortable or embarrassed or inconvenienced. Often the opposite. Our human subjects were often happy to be seen naked, singing, or cleaning their teeth or cutting their toenails or just lying in the water, quietly contemplating their failures and successes. Bathrooms seemed entirely legitimate places after all to be seen naked. There was no patience with prurience or exhibitionism.
I was always sympathetic, and always fully discussed what I was looking for, and if there were objections or necessary accommodations to be acknowledged, I sincerely do not remember them as any inconvenience or something that made it necessary to change anything important in our aims and ambitions.
V is for Violin Practice
This child was keen to show off a little. Encouraged by his grandparents, he often practised in his parent’s bathroom because of the echo, giving him a bigger sound for the same amount of effort.
W is for Washing the Dog
The dog-washer here is Anne-Louise Lambert who starred in the 1975 Australian feature film Picnic at Hanging Rock and then in a feature film I am responsible for called The Draughtsman’s Contract. I had idly conversed with her about bathrooms and she and her dog happily volunteered. The dog’s name was Gloria. And the window cleaner is a happy accidental extra – to be considered a problem in voyeuristc terms if you consider what usually happens in the intimacy of a bathroom.
X is for Expert on Bathrooms
Apart from a generally amused public audience, we received academic interest from interior designers including Barbara Penner of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. who gave it several opportunities for an airing, and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas who exhibited the film in his 2014 “Fundamentals” Venice Architectural Biennale.
Y is for Youthful Exuberance
Back to children - ideal subjects for a joyous bathroom experience – hardly ever failing to produce our delight in their delight.
And Z is for a Zoological Note
So back to amphibians enjoying a holiday.
B
c