I’ve traveled to four countries in two weeks. I’ve stayed in four different hotels and used five different bathrooms.
I changed rooms in the UK due to a booking snafu.
One thing has become apparent to me during this trip.
“Not every thing needs to be a thing.”
I use this phrase a lot, and it refers to the seemingly incessant desire to overcomplicate the world to appear special, unique, artsy, or modern.
It makes me crazy.
And please don’t get me wrong. When I hear people say, “Why reinvent the wheel?” my response is always:
“I believe in better wheels.”
I embrace progress. I love experimentation. I think that being different and separate from the pack is a superpower.
That said, some of these bathrooms, and specifically the showers, were not better wheels. They were simply unnecessarily overcomplicated wheels designed to make the hotel seem more luxurious or more modern than it really was.
Sometimes people just try too hard to be special.
“Not every thing needs to be a thing.”
I began in Little Rock, Arkansas, with a shower that was fine. It had a shower head on the ceiling, a shower sprayer on the wall, and three knobs:
One turned the shower on and switched from shower to sprayer.
One adjusted the temperature.
I could not determine the purpose of the third, no matter how hard I tried.
It also had no soap or shampoo in the shower, but small bottles on the sink and nowhere to put them once in the shower except on the floor.
It was fine. Other than the mystery knob, I had no complaints. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either.
My second shower, in the UK, was a disaster, as I’ve previously described a few days ago. It had a shower head, a sprayer, a floor drain, and a curtain that came down to my knees. It had no tub or lip to catch water, so when you showered, the entire bathroom showered with you.
The sprayer also hung only facing the toilet, so if you turned it on without first grabbing it, the toilet got a shower, too.
And there was no indication on the knob of which was the overhead shower and which was the sprayer, of course, so my toilet received at least two unintended showers while I tried to remember which was which.
This shower had soap and shampoo affixed to the wall with pumps, but the pumps didn’t rise very high, so each press gave me just a few milliliters of soap or shampoo. I had to pump many, many times to get enough product to get clean. I thought that perhaps this was just a problem and not a plan, but in the next bathroom in the same hotel, which I’ll mention in a moment, I encountered the exact same problem, so it’s apparently not a problem but a means by which they can limit visitors’ use of the product while also offering them an excellent forearm workout.
The bathroom also had no vent, so this setup required the bathroom door to stay closed while showering and had a sign indicating as much.
But because I apparently take a very hot shower, the steam left the bathroom when I opened the door (because there was no vent) and set off the fire alarm, requiring the entire hotel, except for me, to evacuate.
I’d like to think it was my worst shower of the trip, but just wait.
On my last night in the UK, I was moved to a new room with a completely different shower setup. It was better because it had a tub to catch the water, but the tub was incredibly high, making any step into it while the water was running precarious. I had to step into the dry tub to avoid slipping, then turn on the water, so I was blasted with an initial salvo of cold water before it warmed up.
It also had a half-glass door, so the back end of the shower was open, which meant some water splashed on the floor, but admittedly, far less than the previous shower, where the floor was also the tub.
Unlike the previous bathroom, this one had a vent, but it could not be turned off, and it was loud and constant. I had to close the bathroom door when I went to bed to muffle the sound.
From the UK, I traveled to Amsterdam, where things really got weird. The shower at The Jaz Hotel was a clear violation of “Not every thing needs to be a thing.”
Instead of a knob to turn the water on and off and adjust the temperature, it had a row of square buttons and a digital readout of water temperature in Celsius. The buttons were exceedingly difficult to press. I had to lean into them to make them work, and because the system was digital, the water behaved strangely.
After great effort, I set my water temperature to 44 degrees Celsius, or about 111 defrees Farenhet, so the shower’s digital mechanism raised the temperature to 44 degrees. Then, after a moment, the water began to get colder, so the 44-degree display flashed and raised the temperature again. After a few moments, the water began to cool again, repeating the process until I was out of the shower.
So I was treated to a shower that could not hold a steady temperature.
This shower had shampoo and soap in bottles fixed to the walls, but you had to squeeze them on the sides to release the product, even though each bottle also had a silver button on top.
Want to guess how long it took me to figure out they were squeeze bottles?
But strangest of all, this bathroom was very orange and featured the lyrics to the classic song “Amsterdam”, written by the Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel in 1964 and translated into English by Mort Shuman and performed by, among others, David Bowie.
I like words, and I like music, but these particular lyrics are about sailors who eat fishheads, suffer from rotted teeth, belch incessantly, and grind their “paunch” against women.
Not what I need in my shower. And after you read it once, you’re done. Now it’s just a meaningless collection of words on your shower wall.
Today, I’m in Montreal at the finest of the four hotels I’ve stayed in during this trip, but despite the opulence, the shower is simple and perfect.
It’s not trying too hard.
The shower is enclosed entirely in glass with a single shower head and a single knob that both turns on the water and adjusts the temperature. Bottles are fixed to the wall with shampoo and soap, and the pumps work as you would expect, delivering an appropriate amount of product with each press.
There is also a tub in the bathroom, which I probably won’t use. Its sides are high, but it’s only a tub. You fill it up and slide into it, the way a tub is supposed to be.
“Not every thing needs to be a thing.”
Sometimes simplicity is divine.
A single knob that turns the water on and off and adjusts temperature in a shower that fully contains the water, with soap and shampoo pumps that operate as designed, is a lovely way to end this very long trip.
I’m only in Montreal for two nights, but I’m thinking about taking at least half a dozen showers in that time, just to immerse myself in the joy of a design that works well and makes sense to the user instantly.
“Not every thing needs to be a thing.”
