4 Reasons Why Bathrooms Are Designed So Weirdly

4 The Medicine Cabinet Is the Worst Place for Medicine

Do you keep some spare snacks in the bathroom, to munch on when you get hungry? Of course not. That would be gross. Even if this food isn’t a ham sandwich but something sealed and nonperishable, we’d never store that in the bathroom. You don’t shit where you eat, as the saying goes. If you’re in the bathroom and want to eat, it’s trivially easy to wait a minute and then go to the kitchen to eat the food there. 

Now, let’s replace the snacks from that last paragraph with something else you eat, something whose purity matters even more: medicine. Suddenly, the idea of storing consumables in the bathroom (in a container named the “medicine cabinet”) is considered perfectly normal. 

It really shouldn’t be. Aside from the vague fear of swallowing aerosolized fecal matter, the bathroom’s a bad place to store drugs because the sudden spikes in temperature and humidity cause drugs to deteriorate extra fast. Bathroom humidity is such a issue that every bathroom is legally mandated to include a fan, to keep the walls from rotting (that’s the primary purpose of the bathroom fan, beyond just clearing odors). It’s not the right room for anything that must be stored “in a cool dry place.” 

The concept of the medicine chest actually predates indoor plumbing. Originally, the medicine chest was a cabinet in the kitchen. The kitchen is also not an ideal place for medicine, since cooking also produces a bunch of heat and humidity, but you can see how this seemed like a natural storage place for anything you eat.

Then wealthier people installed bathrooms, and they moved their medicines there. The bathroom (even with its included toilet) wasn’t considered a disgusting part of the house. Just the opposite — thanks to the modern-looking tile and chrome, it looked like a lab or a doctor’s office. That made it seem like the most appropriate place for your pills and salves. During this same part of the 20th century, the government recommended people keep “a fully stocked medicine cabinet,” and the recommended contents included both medicines and hygiene products. So, people learned to store those two categories of stuff together, even though they serve different functions. 

A drawer in your bedroom makes much more sense as a storage spot for your medicine. Besides being cooler and drier, it’s harder for visitors or a hungry child to snoop through. 

3 Toilet Stalls Have Such Big Gaps to Allow Easy Mopping

A public toilet stall could be its own little room, offering you complete privacy. Instead, a big gap separates the door from the floor, allowing passersby to peer at your feet and the inner folds of your dropped underwear. A gap also separates the stall door from the partition that it latches to. Someone passing by, if they choose, can walk right up to the gap and get a good look at you. Or, they can walk past, looking at the gap through the side of their eye, and build up a complete composite picture of you from a bunch of vertical snapshots.

To management, these gaps are a feature, not a problem. They’d rather be able to see that the stall’s occupant hasn’t fallen to the floor unconscious and isn’t currently injecting themselves with illegal substances. They also choose these stalls simply because that’s what’s standard. As for how the design became standard, that part’s a little more interesting. 

The concept of suspended toilet partitions goes back to one very influential building — the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo. The building included glass doors and air conditioning, which went on to be copied by office buildings in New York City, and therefore, were also copied by buildings worldwide. It included these toilet partitions with gaps as well. All were the idea of the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who happens to be the only architect any of us have ever heard of. 

Wright later noted the irony that “I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the W.C.” This setup is ugly; there’s no getting around that. But Wright said he created it for a practical reason: Such stalls are easier to clean. When a partition fails to reach all the way to the floor, you can mop the stall from outside it, even without securing the door open. The larger the gap, the easier the cleaning. 

And paranoia aside, no one really is peeping in on you when you’re in a stall. So, given the choice, would you take taller walls in exchange for a floor they mop half as often? 

2 Sinks That Are Stuck With Separate Hot and Cold Taps

If you go to England, you might find yourself standing in front of a sink that looks quite confusing. Like so many sinks, there will be one handle for hot water and a second handle for cold water. But rather than mixing and coming out of a single faucet, the two streams of different temperatures each have a faucet of their own. 

You can get hot water or cold water, but you can’t get water that combines the two. That means, if the water coming out of the water heater is scalding hot and the water coming from the mains is chillingly cold — which is the normal situation when it’s cold outside, both in the U.K. and anywhere else — you can’t ever get water at a comfortable temperature. You’d have to mix it yourself manually, which hardly seems like fun.

This sounds like perhaps the first sort of sink anyone thought of after inventing a water heater, and no one ever got around to thinking of something better. In reality, this was a design that was specifically enforced by the government, though alternatives existed. 

Britain first began chlorinating its water at the end of the 19th century. That meant water was soon safe to drink — if you drank it straight from the mains’ supply. If you heated water, however, that meant you stored water for a while in a cistern, perhaps up in a dusty attic. The city had no idea about the state of that cistern. Maybe it was full of Legionnaires’ germs. Maybe it contained your dead cat. 

That meant your hot water, which you warmed, but you never heated enough to sterilize it, could be contaminated, but your cold water never was. The separate tap rule ensured you always had a supply of drinkable water, and that the bad water could never taint the good. Because what good is a bathroom if it can’t save us from a filthy taint? 

1 Everyone’s Hiding Why Toilet Seats Are U-Shaped

Apparently, there’s this long-running battle-of-the sexes over whether the toilet seat goes up or down. If you believe the rumors, the man in a household wants to leave the seat up while the woman wants to keep it down, and both have the same motive — convenient peeing. 

But this is nonsense. Really, everyone should agree to keep the seat down and also keep the lid down on top of the seat. This is equally inconvenient for everyone, but it limits how much bodily waste flies into the air when you flush, marginally reducing the amount of feces that you swallow along with your Percocet. The lid is there for a reason.

So, that’s the situation for a toilet at home, the kind that has a lid. But then you go to a public toilet and see this:

There’s no lid here at all. The owners of this establishment clearly don’t care too much about fecal particles in the air. That’s because not a lot of people are brushing their teeth in the immediate vicinity of this toilet, and because even if they included a lid, they couldn’t trust people to use it properly.

So, instead of the lid, let’s talk just about the seat. It’s U-shaped (an “open front”) rather than being a complete oval. Why’s that? You might guess this is the manufacturer releasing the minimum viable product, because a seat with a gap uses less material. But actually, federal code says public toilets must have these open front seats, while home toilets are welcome not to. All places open to the public have to go with the U-seats, whether they’d like to or not, unless they’re willing to break the code. 

According to the director in charge of the code over at the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO), such a seat is designed in this way so you can more easily reach in and wipe. Specifically, it’s so women can more easily reach in and wipe. The gap lets you “wipe the perineal area,” which we assume is a euphemistic phrase that means, “We’re not just talking about the butt, as that can be accessed from the rear.” 

Since this explanation comes from such a high-up source, we’re happy to share it with you. That doesn’t mean we have to be satisfied with it, however. 

Many women don’t wipe through that gap in the seat. Some do, but others say it’s easier to lean forward and reach from the other end, then wipe front-to-back as your hand retreats. Apparently, wiping through the seat gap is the preferred option for anyone with reduced strength or balance, who can’t lean forward, but we’re skeptical that the code back in 1955 was written with these people in mind. We’re even more skeptical, in fact, that the code in 1955 was written with women in mind, when designing a toilet seat that both women and men must use. 

Some versions of the code provide an exception to the U-shape rule. They say public toilet seats can use full ovals if the toilet has an automatic seat-cover dispenser. This indicates that the gap in open-front seats is for hygiene, not convenience. 

A report from 1965, when the rule was relatively new, says open-front seats were designed “to alleviate two general problems, both of which focus on male use.” The first is that the front of the seat is the section most likely to wind up pee-stained, which was a bigger deal back when toilets used different materials that were harder to clean. The reports concedes that cutting out that section probably does little to address this, as pee would now stain the rim below rather than the seat.

The second problem is “contact with the seat.” They aren’t talking about the ass or thighs making contact here but exclusively about the penis. With a complete oval, the tip of the penis might plonk onto the seat, the very seat that another man’s penis plonked a few minutes ago. With a U-seat, a cushion of air may instead separate the tip from any physical surface. Seat contact not only caused discomfort but raised the specter of disease transmission. This other report from 1913 recommends open-front seats in school toilets, to prevent the spread of venereal disease. 

This idea, that the gap in the U-shape is a penis hole, is fairly intuitive. It’s surprising then that seemingly no source from anytime in the last 50 years is willing to acknowledge it. This is probably because if anyone does bring it up, that will spark a debate on whether the penis tip actually would rest on an oval toilet seat, or whether it would extend too far for that, or not far enough. That discussion would require every man involved to reveal their penis size, and no one wants that. 

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