I recently became a fan of the British comedy series Fresh Meat, about a group of (mostly) first-year students at the fictional Manchester Medlock University (strange-sounding name to me, but whatever).
On more than one occasion, more than one main character (who are supposed to be around 17-19 years old, I believe) mentions the desirability of having a “wet room” in the house.
I was not familiar with this terminology but looked it up. It’s a type of bathroom in which the bathing area is not enclosed or separated from the rest of the room. So, essentially, the entire room is the bath. Obviously, this is appropriate only for shower baths—there’s no enclosure to fill up and soak in.
Now, although I wasn’t familiar with the term “wet room,” I am familiar with the concept. I have seen such bathing facilities in health care facilities.
Also, almost every bath room I have been in at a residence in India is built along the same concept—the walls and the floor are all polished concrete (with or without partial tiling) and the shower head just sticks out of the wall. The water goes out a floor drain.
Indeed, back in the '70s, one of our relatives was visiting us in the United States, and he took a shower without pulling the curtain and flooded the floor of the bathroom. He thought that the floor air register was a drain.
What interests me now is the idea that teen-agers would be so interested in having a “wet room” in their campus residential situation that the characters would mention its absence from their housing arrangement on more than one occasion. Has it become that common and popular in Britain that even college kids would keenly miss the absence of a wet room?
I’ve stayed in a campus room that had one. It is the smallest possible bathroom, essentially, so is the standard for a dorm room ensuite. In fact, in the context of modern dorms, I would say you would either have a “wet room” or a shared bathroom. So in that case a wet room is highly preferable.
It’s kind of a pain, if you need to use the toilet between the time you shower and however long it takes for everything to dry out. You basically have to take your pants off and hang them outside before you go.
There is a similar idea that I have seen in newer luxury homes and very high end hotels that gives you the benefits of a ‘wet room’ but none of the drawbacks. The shower area is basically a room within a room and it isn’t located in a bathtub or a standard shower stall. Instead, it is separated from the rest of the room by a glass partition but the shower floor itself is made of the same material as the rest of the bathroom (usually stone or decorative concrete). There are usually multiple shower heads shooting out in different directions. My parents have one in their McMansion and a hotel I stayed at in Costa Rica last year had one in every suite.
The difference is that these showers are huge and the overall bathrooms are bigger than many people’s living rooms. I don’t know why you would want to turn a small bathroom into one big shower but it is a nice luxury item for huge custom bathrooms.
The first two points are essentially the same: They’re very popular among affluent people — this would suggest to me that we’re talking about the giant-sized ones, not the space-saving ones. But why are they so popular among affluent people and when and how did this happen?
As an aside, these types of bathrooms in India are not small if they include both a shower and a toilet. A house with limited space would have separate, tiny, rooms for the shower and the toilet. And the washbasin (sink) would be in the corridor or some other room.
It’s the standard for most modern Japanese bathrooms. Toilet and washbasin are seperate, but the bath, the shower and and space for sitting down in front of a mirror (for shaving etc) are all enclosed in a ‘wet room’ with a central drain.
This is the typical bathroom in a Japanese home, although they usually include a bathtub. It’s spacious enough for a couple, or a parent with young children. We also don’t stand when using the shower and sit on a small bench instead, which is more comfortable and easier to wash every nook and cranny.
Another thing I like about this design is it keeps the toilet in its own separate room.
Only thing in the US like this that I can think of is in RV bathrooms (i.e. motorhome/campers). If the bathroom needs to be small they’ll design it as a ‘wet’ bathroom like above. Actually until you get into large diesel pusher RVs they should all be like this as they’re never really big enough to remain ‘dry’.
In the early 2000’s according to my experience for the large affluent American versions. They correlate very highly with other pseudo-Asian bathroom fads like sinks that are also raised bowls or mini fountains. They can be pretty but I expect they will look quite dated not ten years from now and many of them already are. They come mostly from a time when pouring any money into home amenities was easy to do because of quickly rising housing costs, the idea that any upgrade to your home was a sound financial idea and the cheap and easy availability of home improvement loans. Those are only one example of many such home improvement fads that originated from that period.
My in-laws had something like that at a former residence - they called it a “roman shower”. One advantage would be if someone were in a wheelchair or using a walker: nothing to step over to get to it.
I’ve never seen a wet room as described in the OP, though TruCelt’s description reminds me of what they do in recreational vehicles to provide shower facilities.
I don’t want to be too hard on people that spent money to have such a thing as a luxury. Walk-in shower rooms are very nice. Raised bowl fountain sinks are dumb because they are only semi-functional at their essential job but there have been many worse home improvement transgressions. The big fad during the late 80’s and 90’s was to build elaborate home theater systems with surround sound and very expensive equipment. I knew people that had them but I never witnessed anyone actually watch a movie with more than one other person in one. They are almost universally a waste of space and resources. Now that large screen TV’s are cheap and light enough to hang almost anywhere, they are obsolete not even considering that most younger people prefer to get their video on demand on their own devices and not try to organize a party in a specific place around a set viewing.
At least a fancy bathroom is guaranteed use quite regularly.
My great-uncle had one in his suburban tract home in the 60’s, but he called it a Roman shower, just like Mama Zappa’s in-laws. It wasn’t huge, but I had never seen anything like it. It was large enough so that he didn’t need any kind of glass partition to prevent water going on the floor by the toilet. Since then I’ve thought it was a great idea and I have wanted one, except I keep wondering how cold I’d be in the winter.
Wet rooms are a frequently-appearing feature on home renovation and self-build shows here in the UK - speaking from experience of not having one, they do sound pretty good.
Managing water spillage and cleanup at the boundaries of shower cublicle, bath, sink etc is a bit of a pain, and the corners and junctions between wet and dry areas are places where water/condensation tends to collect and mould starts to grow - I can definitely see the advantages of being able to treat the whole room to a single, flat, bulk cleaning regime.
