Style Over Safety Part II: More on What’s Wrong with Today’s Bathroom Design - GreenBuildingAdvisor

Building Matters Style Over Safety Part II: More on What’s Wrong with Today’s Bathroom Design From toilet placement to grab bars and bidet seats, better bathroom design can improve safety, hygiene, and comfort—especially as homeowners age By LLOYD ALTER | March 23, 2026 More Building Matters 3D-Printed Houses Are Here Building Science Puzzles: Wine Room Weirdness—Part 2 Building Science Puzzles: Wine Room Weirdness—Part 1 Style Over Safety: What’s Wrong With Today’s Bathroom Design In the previous article, Style Over Safety: What’s Wrong with Today’s Bathroom Design, we looked mainly at tubs and showers. However, there are many issues with sinks, toilets, and basic bathroom layouts that are often ignored or overlooked.Toilets are a failure of design and function from first principles. Whoever thought it was a good idea to use expensive drinking water to wash away poop? Historically, we didn’t; we used the smelly outhouse out back, quite separate from where we washed with water, which we carried from the pump, often to a washstand in our bedrooms. We bathed in the kitchen, where the hot water was. Why did we sit on benches with a hole in them in the West, when people in the East would squat? And once we got toilets, whoever decided that it was a good idea to put them in the same room as where we wash?The fact is nobody really planned any of this; it just happened. When water was piped to houses, it went to the kitchen, and then to sinks built into washstands in the bedrooms...