Huh.. I've stayed in over 1,000 hotels and Airbnbs over the last 15 years and not once saw a bathroom with no door. Lots of bathroom windows, but always some kind of door.
I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.
Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.
In Hyperion, the character Martin Silenus is rich enough that he lives in a novelty palace where all the rooms are connected by teleporters. As a joke, the bathroom is a wallless raft on an ocean world.
Outside of the realm of science fiction, my sister followed a TV show for a while that was basically a set of advertisements for a modular home company. One episode featured the installation of a small home on a remote British island; the shower was a pipe outside the house itself.
We installed an outdoor shower at our house. There's nothing as nice as a cold shower outdoors on a really hot day. It feels so luxurious that I can pretend I'm a rich person instead of lower- to mid-middle class.
We once stayed in a beach house with an outdoor shower in South Africa. One morning I got up, took a shower (without my glasses, I am very short sighted) and went in for breakfast. About 20 minutes later my sister-in-law comes running into the house shouting that "there is a huge snake in the outside shower"
I've seen this. Sometimes, they have curtains. I don't really understand what the point is though. It's definitely not price. I would imagine that it's costlier to add a window to a wall than just to brick it. I thought it was to allow one to watch the TV while taking a shower or a bath. It's the most reasonable thing I could come up with.
It's to encourage e.g. two coworkers to get separate rooms instead of one room with separate beds. The increase in revenue is more than the construction cost.
People voting with their wallet are why Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Monsanto and Boeing are still in business.
And people voting with their wallet have led to literally hundreds of thousands of companies going out of business.
Or perhaps the individual's dollar is not really that effective. It's like plastic recycling -- it is a way to make the consumer feel like it is their job to fix things that they really have no responsibility for or control over.
The individuals isnt, but as soon as you attempt to organise a widespread boycott they will come for you. BDS type movements are sucessful, that's why they often get so much push back.
This erosion of privacy is being taken to extremes.
One of my short stories takes place in a not-to-distant future, where there is absolutely no privacy. In one chapter a child goes to a bathroom in an old building, and he sees that there is not only a door, but there is a contraption on it. A lock! The child runs out of the bathroom in fright. The audience learns only a little later that the child is frightened about what human-eating animals might stalk prey in that area, that anybody would ever think to lock themselves in there.
It was quite shocking for me as somebody from eastern Europe to see ie Danish or Dutch homes having no curtains whatsoever, so me walking on sidewalk looking at them 3m from me behind the windows having breakfast, in pyjamas, kids doing early morning nasal cavities treasure hunt with finger etc.
Same for living rooms and bedrooms (those I would expect to at least have some curtains aside).
Still not used to it, i like my privacy and ability to shamelessly say scratch my butt when alone if needed.
Haha dutch guy here... Who cares? Our bedrooms have curtains! Actually living rooms usually as well, but we are reluctant in closing them I guess. Also, you'll often find patches of intransparant glass to prevent directly looking in.
But then the horror to go to the US and find toilets in i.e. hospitals that don't have doors closing all the way. You can literally stare someone in the eye through the crack in the door, or over the door, while he's taking a dump. Holy cow. Imagine the sounds echoing through the collective toilet room. My god. I'm still recovering from my visit to the prestigious Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Having a s* together with someone in the next stall is a whole new level of intimacy I was not ready for.
When I lived in NL, it was explained to me that closing the curtains would imply, in some sort of weird Calvinistic belief, that the occupants were engaged in some nefarious activities; therefore the curtains are left open to show that the occupants have nothing to hide and are engaged only in wholesome activities.
The other side of the social contract obliges passers-by to not look inside.
The other strange thing that I found is that some apartments have little spy mirrors mounted on the exterior wall to allow the occupants to monitor what's going on in the street.
> the occupants were engaged in some nefarious activities; therefore the curtains are left open to show that the occupants have nothing to hide and are engaged only in wholesome activities.
That sounds utterly dystopian. Whose business is it if we want to shag in the morning?
It’s also completely self-defeating. Nobody can prove that they never did anything that someone else would disapprove. There are solid reasons behind the "innocent until proven guilty" principle.
I’m sorry, do you mean Orwell’s “1984”? Because all I can find for “1948” is an Israeli autobiographical novel, that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t resemble “We”. (Although, imho, “1984” is quite different from “We” as well.)
Yes! I was just recently traveling for work in a decent hotel but not a suite, just one with two queen beds but by myself. It had a glass barn door and the top half was frosted glass with "painted" glass on the bottom. Irritating but at least it was just me.
The worst aspect of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport was the sliding bathroom door. Almost everything else about the place was really great but the bathroom door wae 1/2" from the face of the wall and bounced off the end of the slider track.
Well, I still don't wanna make everybody in the room have to listen to my grunts as I push out an unhealthy binge-drinking hangover turd followed by a liter of flatulent gas and and liquid spraying into the bowl. I like my privacy, kthx.
There was a time, over a year ago now, when I was working on a project that required some very raunchy, dirty, absolute gutter language.
ChatGPT would only get about 30% of the way there, and never further. It stayed restrained, always.
But ChatGPT + image gen? This produced unfiltered amazement.
It played out like this: Tell the bot to generate an image involving some ludicrously filthy text backstory, and it would generate and display a prompt for Dall-E. But that generated prompt seemed to bypass the filters and could be absolute trash -- plain, no nonsense, dirt-nasty holy-fuckballs craptacularity.
Dall-E would refuse the prompt, of course, but it remained in the chat log for perusal.
Later, they made the generated prompt disappear when Dall-E refused. (This may in fact be my fault. I sent it on some pretty deep dives.)
And nowadays, it seems that we don't get to see the generated prompt at all, even when Dall-E accepts a (very normal, not pushing boundaries at all) prompt and generates an image.
But for a minute there: I did get to peer into depths of the wildly creative foulness that the bot can concoct. What we see above (in GP comment) isn't even scratching the surface.
(I didn't write about this little "jailbreak" anywhere at that time because I'm selfish, and I wanted to keep using it myself.)
You're joking, but my wife got us a box emitting bird sounds when the motion sensor is triggered. Suffice to say that it does absolutely nothing to mask the sounds that are produced on a toilet, it's just another ridiculous layer on top of it.
Right, one might suppose so. Alas, the chirps echoing within a tiled 3x3' cell grind my ears. Besides it feels a bit out of place within these plain white confinements. I just can't conjure up the mental image of being out in the woods.
But you have to pick your battles with your partner. I'm turning the volume down, and when the battery's empty I don't exactly hasten to change it.
Some people make noise when they eat with their mouth open. It's not scandalous, it's just ignorant and gross. It's always an utter clod that is so unaware of themselves just smucking and squelching away on their open mouth full of gloopy donut muck.
It's not a virtue to be so unselfcounscious. It's not about being ashamed or inhibited or in pathological denial of biological realities. It's about being fucking minimally considerate and just the tiniest bit self-aware.
I had a friend growing up who ate with his mouth open. I fucking hated it. But he had problems breathing through his nose due to something with his soft tissue in his throat. So, you learn to ignore it.
I agree but only because that's the standard for our culture so somebody not doing it is probably being disrespectful which means it becomes offensive to others because it normally only comes from people with some sort of negative feeling or inconsiderateness for those around them. In some cultures, noisy eating is the proper way and shows you're enjoying the food. Same goes for clothes, toilet sounds, etc. It's a lot more repulsive seeing a human poo on the street than a dog even though it's not fundamentally very different.
> It's so common that the only logical explanation is that it is encouraged. It appears to be the norm and the non-slurper is the exception. I'm glad that your parents taught you to not slurp. You are an exceptional individual.
Anyway I’ve asked enough Chinese people about it to get the same answer. Not all do it, but some do it for these reasons.
They are saying it is normal to slurp noodles, which is what I said in my first reply to you. They did not say that they make 'loud mouth noises' as a sign of respect.
Ask this specific question: "Do you make loud mouth noises while you eat as a sign of respect, or is it just normal to slurp noodles?" and see what answer you get.
I recently stayed at a hotel in San Francisco that had no bathroom door. I'd even upgraded to the queen size room specifically because their layout map showed a door while the smaller rooms did not. I was pretty annoyed by that. (Edit: Despite being a single traveller. I think doors are important for hygiene).
In my part of the US, a lot of our "old" houses were built before indoor plumbing.
So when the plumbing was installed, obviously some went to the kitchen. And the bathroom, which previously didn't exist, was often an addition to (or a division from) the kitchen -- with a doorway [with a door] betwixt the kitchen and the bathroom -- because that made the plumbing easier.
IIRC, that particular feature disqualifies the home for financing with both the VA and with HUD for reasons of hygiene.
So by extension: According to VA and HUD, hygiene requires at least one door and at least one additional room of separation between the place where you shit and the place where you eat.
I assume my house in the Northeast didn't originally have indoor plumbing. The bathroom is upstairs; I assume it was carved off from one of the upstairs bedrooms or it was a closet/storage area of some sort. It's been redone a couple times since I moved in and it does have a door.
My present house (in Ohio) also has its singular bathroom upstairs. The bathroom is on top of the kitchen. Neither room is an addition -- as far as I can tell, it has always used this basic layout.
According to aerial photos, it was built in the 1950s. It resides within a small but very industrialized city that was positively booming at the time the home was constructed; it definitely included plumbing from the beginning.
A previous house in the same city was definitely built before indoor plumbing. It was even built before separate kitchens were considered normal or necessary. It originally had only two rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs. Heating and cooking would have been provided by a central stove (probably wood-fired, and with no ductwork).
While it was stick-built, it was initially only a step or two above a fairly primitive log cabin in function.
By the time I lived there, it also had a kitchen, laundry, downstairs bathroom, another upstairs bedroom, and subgrade basement added. The bathroom was part of the kitchen addition, and one entered the bathroom through the kitchen.
I've actually lived in three houses so far that were initially constructed like that -- with two rooms downstairs, and two upstairs.
Only one of those 3 had a bathroom that was separated from the kitchen by a room, and that one was perhaps the oldest: The floor joists for the first level were made from logs that were hewn flat[ish] on the top by hand, and that still hard bark on them. For that house, the bathroom was its own small separate single-story addition that jutted off of the side of [what had become] the dining room.
The house I grew up in was larger and much more-nicely finished in terms of things like woodworking and trim, but was also very old by US norms. It was built before both plumbing and electricity, though it included gas lighting (!) in every room. The partial basement, kitchen and downstairs bathroom were additions, but the bathroom connected to two different common rooms even though it was physically adjacent to the kitchen. There also was an upstairs bathroom, and which was created by taking part of the master bedroom and making it into a hallway while the the original bedroom closet became the bathroom (with a small and somewhat haphazard roof extension where the bathtub was).
Anyway: The point, other than that old houses present interesting evolutions, is that old houses often (but not always) had bathrooms attached to the kitchen -- and that we usually seek to keep them separated these days in newer construction, at least in the US.
I've also lived in a few different apartment buildings (many of which were "old", but all of which were initially intended to be apartment buildings), and all of those bathrooms were separated from the kitchen by a hallway.
And all of these bathrooms had doors. I don't understand the questioning of bathroom doors that I see here in some comments -- at all.
(I shall spare at this time the details of the house I once owned that had been an old farmhouse (with no gas, no lights, and no plumbing), and which had subsequently been divided into a triplex that contained a total of 17 distinct rooms. I could probably write a whole book about that place.)
My house is early 1800s (old farmhouse). Yes, the bathroom is pretty much right above the kitchen/pantry presumably because that was the most straightforward way to pipe it. Not even sure what is original and what was probably installed/built around 1900 or so.
No real opportunity to put in another bathroom and I've talked with contractors. You could squeeze a really minimalist half bath in the pantry but then you lose the pantry and the washer/dryer need to go somewhere and the basement isn't really a good idea for various reasons.
It helps. Know what also helps more? A second barrier after that one.
I’m sure a third would also help even more (front door of the house?) but most people consider that a bit excessive for daily use within their own domicile.
How much does the door help? I think generally people don't follow hygiene to the point that particles anywhere in the bathroom won't get tracked out of the bathroom. Don't get me started on people who touch their phones while eating...
tbh if I start worrying about poop particles in my day to day, I fear I'm one step closer to becoming a germaphobe. plus I feel if that's something that truly worries you, you'd start taking showers after each poop because clearly you will bring some poop particles with you when you leave anyway.
maybe this thread will end up being some kind of revelation, but I very much agree with the person you replied to. If I'm alone, I'm not bothered and the door may as well stay open
Sure, you can't get rid of everything. But you can mitigate a few things, and closing the door is such an easy fix... There's worrying too much, and there's not worrying enough
>A 2024 study showed evidence that even closing the lid may still lead to small viral particles escaping through gaps under the lid, resulting in viral cross contamination of the air and surfaces in a washroom
You can't get covid from contact infection. Or at least it's really, really hard. We could dig up studies for that, but you can also look at how food delivery which exploded in popularity all over the world during the lockdowns apparently did not transmit Covid.
You're moving the goal posts. Your assertion was that viruses don't last long outside the body. GP shot down that argument. You have not refuted their argument.
Even without being that strict about the discussion, I think GP was making the point that viruses can survive for many days, so stating that "you'd only be exposed to viruses from people you already share a room (or even bed) with." is an argument that requires some elaboration.
Have you just been trolling this thread for a few hours posting this copypasta to anyone who thinks not having bathroom doors is gross? This is the third or fourth one of these I've seen, and that's a pretty weird battle to fight, is all I'm saying.
Little pieces of shit can fly through the air quite far when the wc is flushed. As a former British person I had no idea about this, but was brought up to speed by US family members..
Update: this is why you should put the lid down to flush. But put it back up again after because <reasons>
So, would you state that you generally advocate for hinged surfaces in bathrooms, and being able to use them to adequately close/shield a larger space from a smaller space? ;)
Me neither, but I remember that when searching for hotels and Airbnbs, I only filter for hotels that are 8+/10 domestically and 9+/10 internationally, which filters out many of the hotels that have those kinds of issues (and score doesn't affect budget much).
Booking.com has this grade inflation issue. if something is shit but you rate everything else fairly (things like location, staff friendliness, etc), the final score will be 7 or 8.. in summary: I had a lousy experience, 7/10!
It takes some experience to realize that a place graded 7.x probably has serious issues.
The problem here is that "mean" is a poor average. For hotels, if you're rating in 10 different categories, you really want a single 0/10 to bring the overall score down by way more than one point.
The opposite situation can also occur. At my university, entrance scholarships were decided a few years ago based on students' aggregate score across 25ish dimensions (I can't remember the exact number) where students were each rated 1-4. Consequently a student who was absolutely exceptional in one area would be beaten out by a student who was marginally above average in all the other areas. I suggested that rather than scoring 1-4 the scores should be 1/2/5/25 instead.
The problem here begins even before the mathematical issue - it's that web sites that live from listing bookings have an incentive to offer a way to delete reviews that are not in line with what the owner wants to see.
Honestly, the ratings on those sites are essentially useless anyway, because people are bad at reviewing.
I generally sample the lowest rating written reviews, to check if people are complaining about real stuff, or are just confused. For instance, if a hotel doesn't have a bar, some of the negative reviews will usually be about how the hotel doesn't have a bar; these can be safely ignored as having been written by idiots (it is not like the hotel is hiding the fact that it doesn't have a bar).
Occasionally some of the positive reviews are similarly baffling. Was recently booking a hotel in Berlin in January, and the top review's main positive comment about the hotel was that it had heating. Well, yeah, I mean, you'd hope so. I can only assume that the reviewer was a visitor from the 19th century.
The worst thing I’ve found with positive reviews is ones that are obviously fake/incentivized. I looked up reviews recently for a hotel that I used to stay at a lot for work, and had gone way downhill with many issues (broken ACs, mold, leaking ceilings, etc.). I was curious if they ever fixed their problems. I was at first surprised that they had a fairly positive overall review rating. But looking deeper, the many negative reviews were just crowded out by obviously fake reviews. Dead giveaways: every single one named multiple people by name. “Dave at the front desk was just so friendly and welcoming! Barbara the housecleaner did a fantastic job cleaning. And Steve the bartender just made my day! I love this hotel! 5 stars!” (Almost) nobody reviewing a hotel for real does that.
Wow I've only stayed in about 100 but have seen several.
There are several variations:
- bathrooms with glass walls but with (glass) door
- bathrooms with walls but without door
- bathrooms with partially open walls, sometimes even with door :P
The worst was when I was once sharing a room with my daughter and the bathroom was one with glass walls and no shower curtain.
We decided to schedule our toilet visits and showers so the other one would not be in the room.
I've been in hotels with no bathroom door, but it has pretty much always been in tiny one-person rooms, where realistically there are not going to be two people in the room because they _would not fit_. I don't have a particular problem with it there.
(In that case, the reason it's done is fairly clearly that to accommodate a door they'd have to make the room bigger.)
I run into this barn door style decently often at run of the mill Marriotts and Hiltons across the US. It seems like the chances are higher the newer the construction.
I've seen it at cheap hotels (EasyHotel and similar) but generally only in tiny single-person rooms (of the "single bed and just enough space to walk past it to the bathroom, which is the size of an airplane toilet" variety), where it's basically _fine_.
I've stayed in probably 15 hotels in the US in the past 15 years and at least one of them had either no bathroom door, or a glass door, or a bathroom door and a shower that had a glass door.
My sister shared with me a home listing that had a bedroom and basically a toilet in a closet, and no door — just a curtain for privacy. That was weird.
The weirdest one I stayed at so far was a hotel with tiny rooms in central London which had the upper half of the wall separating the bathroom made out of the kind of glass that becomes opaque with electricity. The switch to control that was outside of the bathroom, of course.
And I don't even travel that much, around once a year on average.
My most recent encounter with no-bathroom-door was in a hotel in London that was under 100 pounds a night. Though the room was so tiny that I'd honestly be happy enough to give them a pass on it.
Post-Sheraton acquisition, I find the Marriott branding can be a bit random. Still stay in them a lot, but I've had a couple of relatively mediocre Aloft stays of late.
Uhh, Aloft is in Marriott's "Select" bucket along with Fairfield and Courtyard. They have some shiny touches that let them claim the "Distinctive" label, but are basically just motels.
I see it all the time. I actually don’t have an issue with it though. I’m usually alone in the room, or with my family and we all know that we poop. Not that we don’t respect privacy but when circumstance arise, we can bunk together in close quarters without it being super weird.
Yes, not one. I just googled for pictures of hotel bathrooms without doors out of curiosity and mostly see sliding and frosted glass doors. Is that what people are talking about?
I remember hotel in China several years ago where the bathroom had a door, but the wall between bathroom and sleeping area was unfrosted glass with no blind. Idiotic design trend.
