Style Over Safety: What’s Wrong With Today’s Bathroom Design - GreenBuildingAdvisor
Summary
The article critiques modern bathroom designs that prioritize aesthetics over safety, highlighting issues with freestanding tubs and poorly placed controls that compromise user comfort and security.
Why It Matters
This discussion is crucial as it raises awareness about the potential hazards in contemporary bathroom designs, urging designers and consumers to consider safety alongside style. With an aging population and increasing focus on accessibility, this topic is relevant for both homeowners and industry professionals.
Key Takeaways
- Modern bathroom designs often prioritize aesthetics over safety.
- Freestanding tubs and poorly placed controls can create hazards.
- Designers should consider user comfort and accessibility.
- The article references historical perspectives on bathing and design.
- Awareness of these issues is essential for safer home environments.
Building Matters Style Over Safety: What’s Wrong With Today’s Bathroom Design From freestanding tubs to poorly placed shower controls, today’s bathrooms often ignore the fundamentals of safe, functional design. By LLOYD ALTER | February 17, 2026 It's builders show season, and there are a lot of bathtubs! More Building Matters No Small Matter: What Makes Housing “Right”? Not Small, Just Right: The Right-Sized Home What Is Building Science? Is Your Building Project a Symphony or a Jazz Performance? Architectural critic Sigfried Giedion wrote in Mechanization Takes Command, “The bath and its purpose have held different meanings for different ages. The manner in which a civilization integrates bathing within its life, as well as the type of bathing it prefers, yields searching insight into the inner nature of the period.”So what insight would a historian gain from looking at bathrooms and bathtubs in particular today? That we live in an era in which we value style over safety, youth over older people, and form over function.Go to any builder’s or kitchen and bath show, and you will see so many of these fancy freestanding bathtubs, usually with floor-mounted controls, or with the controls mounted on the far wall and difficult to reach. The designers revel in the new technologies that let them make the walls of the tub as thin as possible. What they do not seem to care about is making them safe or comfortable.Image from The Bathroom Book.In his 1966 classic The Bathroom Book, Al...