The bathroom transcendent

One morning while sponging brackish water from a two-piece toilet whose tank I’d unseated while climbing out of our shower-tub, I asked my wife, who was sopping up the water that had leaked from the shower onto the linoleum floor, what she’d like for her birthday. It was idle conversation, meant to shift the focus from our moldy, depressing bathroom to something light and cheerful. But my wife took the question seriously and her plaintive answer cut me to the quick.

“You know what I want for my birthday?” she said, sitting down on the edge of the grungy avocado-colored tub in which we’d bathed our two babies, both of whom are now in college. “I want a grown-up bathroom.”

It is impossible to convey just how profoundly her words struck me. A grown-up bathroom. It was like a slap in the face. I stopped my sponging and took a good, hard look at our ‘60s-era bathroom, with the mushy, moldy drywall; the dust-encrusted ceiling fan and the metal medicine cabinet speckled with rust. The scales fell from my eyes. I, too, wanted a grown-up bathroom. We all want a grown-up bathroom, don’t we? Say hallelujah, brothers and sisters! We all deserve a grown-up bathroom, don’t we? Not someplace where we hurriedly do our business and wash our face, but someplace pleasant. A retreat. Nay, a sanctuary. According to the National Kitchen and Bath Assn., the average person visits the toilet 2,500 times a year. And spends about three years of his or her life in the bathroom. Three years!

Now think about that, then say the truth with me and it will set you free: “I want a grown-up bathroom.”

Because the minute you acknowledge the truth, you will be transformed. From your bosom will spring forth all sorts of repressed desires. Like the fact that you don’t just want a new bathtub; you want a soaking tub. With air jets! And constant hot water! Enough hot water that you’ll never, ever have to use the word “tepid” again!

And you want a towel warmer. Yes you do, I know you do! With thick, fluffy towels to warm on it. Towels like you get at luxury resorts and spas. Where they have heated floors--yes! You want that too! Floors that are 80--no, 85!--degrees at 6 in the morning when you sit on your Toto Neorest toilet with a sensor-operated lid that opens automatically to reveal a heated seat (ah!).

We all want a grown-up bathroom, don’t we? We do indeed, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Assn., which notes that 8 million of us remodeled our bathrooms last year. And guess what? A 2004 survey by RemodelingOnline magazine that compared cost versus value of upscale bathroom remodels showed that the $20,000 to $25,000 we spent on average was well worth it. Such remodels, which included custom showers, a bidet, stone vanity tops, twin designer sinks and a humidistat-controlled exhaust fan, would bring an average 86% return if the home were sold. So you can have your bidet and have someone else eventually pay for it.

That’s great, says Brett Kurtz, a personal trainer who’s rushing to complete a major bathroom remodel before his wife gives birth to their third child in May. But he acknowledges that it’s not his primary concern. “Really,” he says, “we’re doing it because my wife wants a bathroom that is relaxing and comfortable. Like a spa.”

The Kurtzes are not alone. Alyssa Alex, a project architect at Boffi Los Angeles, attributes the boom in bathroom remodeling to our need to pamper ourselves as a way to combat stress.”People travel so much now, and particularly while on business they stay at luxury hotels, and they want to have that environment in their own home,” she says. “We want our bathrooms to be places where we can get away from the hustle and bustle. We want them to provide us with kind of a Zen environment.”

She’s right, we do! Or I certainly do. And it’s not until you become a bathroom convert, like me, that you realize how much stuff is out there to help you achieve your goal of peace and tranquillity through the transcendent power of a new loo. For instance: The Kohler sok tub not only keeps you up to your neck in continuously warmed water, it also has a chromatherapy option for mental relaxation. Eight hues, selected to have an emotional impact on the bather, are sequentially transmitted via LED lights tucked into the inner walls of the tub. The cost for a chromatherapy bath? More than $8,000.

“You see how far the pendulum has swung from a simple bathroom to a retreat where anything you can imagine is possible?” says Albert Elihu, president of EuroConcepts Bath in West Hollywood. Elihu, who has been in the business 26 years, says he has had customers come into his store in the Pacific Design Center in search of a product they saw at a spa resort. Two such customers the day before I visited were Barbra Streisand and Paul Anka. “They were both in here shopping for new bathrooms,” he says.

But celebrities aren’t the only ones who want the newest bathroom fixture, whether it’s a Seura Television Mirror, which has an LCD TV that disappears within the mirror when it’s off, or a glass wash basin that doubles as an aquarium (beneath the pop-out soap dishes are openings for feeding your fish).

“We don’t just want what’s functional,” says Susan Cohen-Rooks, who has been in the bathroom remodeling business since 1982. “We want fixtures that are also interior art. It’s form and function. And it’s all beautiful stuff.”

Beautiful like the nearly $2,000 celadon “art glass” basin at Ann Sacks in Los Angeles (we don’t call them sinks anymore; they’re “art basins” or “vessel sinks,” and they often sit on top of the counter to give you a look of, well, art). And beautiful like the stainless-steel Cut series of faucets and shower fixtures at Boffi that look like precision-cut aeronautical equipment--elegant and effortless to operate--and can easily cost $3,000-plus for a built-in shower system.

But you don’t have to turn to Italian designers (or spend gobs of money) for stylish bathroom fixtures. Delta, the largest faucet manufacturer in the U.S., has borrowed a page from the Target playbook and hired Michael Graves to design an upscale line of faucets, towel bars and soap dispensers. Last year Moen introduced a new style-driven line of bathroom fixtures called ShowHouse that includes, for about $600, a high-arcing “Asian”-style faucet with an open spout.

“People can go to Lowe’s or Home Depot’s EXPO Design Center and get all sorts of luxury bathroom products,” Elihu says. “And then you have all these shows on TV that show people not only all the things they can have in their bathrooms, but how to install them as well. I think that’s really helped drive people to put extra money in their bathroom remodel.”

Elihu says the biggest innovation he’s seen is the multi-function shower. “It’s amazing what’s available these days,” he says. Like BainUltra’s Temazkal therapeutic shower that, inspired by the Mexican sweat bath houses called temazcals, combines dry-heat therapy, aromatherapy and full-spectrum light therapy in a shower stall. You breathe in a little orange-lavender essence while you sweat to open your pores and relax your muscles, then hit yourself with a little full-spectrum light therapy to combat “moroseness and seasonal depression” before taking a pre-heated shower.

Or you take a steam shower in a unit no larger than a typical shower that also comes equipped with a radio or CD player and a telephone. So you can take a meeting while sweating in temps from 90 to 125 degrees.

“Steam showers are much more popular than in-home saunas these days,” Cohen-Rooks says. And showers, in general, are more popular than tubs. Although many homeowners installed water-jet tubs in the ‘80s and ‘90s, surveys showed that, on average, they were used only four times a year. “You couldn’t put things like bathing salts or oils in them and they were noisy,” says Elihu, adding that you get more bang for your buck with shower installations such as the Pharo Showerpanel Lift, which allows you to control the height of the shower head for a full-body hydro-massage.

For those who still prefer to soak, the trend is toward air jets that are gentler, quieter and, Elihu says, more hygienic. “It’s a completely sanitary system,” he says, noting that air-jet tubs made by BainUltra and Americh range from $1,500 for a basic model to $6,000 for Americh’s Crillon Platinum tub. The latter includes a neck pillow, mood lights, low-level water sensor and an inline water heater.

Tubs that heal you, showers that massage you and toilets that anticipate your needs--the options are innumerable. In our new grown-up bathroom, we went for a Kohler soak tub, dual-head shower, limestone countertops, humidistat-controlled exhaust fan, circulating hot water pump (instant hot water in the shower!), spot mood lighting and tricked-out cabinets with in-drawer electrical outlets so hairdryers and electric toothbrushes are always plugged in and off the countertop. My wife’s favorite upgrade? The electric heating beneath the custom tile floor. Four days a week, she rises at 5:30 a.m. to jog with friends. Four days a week at 5:31 a.m. I hear her close the bathroom door and sigh, “Ahhh!” when her feet hit the 80-degree floor.

Now that’s a heavenly, grown-up moment.