Our old house did.
This one, the window is above the sink.
The house before last, the bathroom was in the middle of the house (literally), so no windows at all.
Ditto the house before that. (Though it was closer to the outside wall…it just had a couple closets going between it and the wall.
3 of the 5 places I’ve lived in as an adult had windows in the bathroom. The first place was next to the toilet and couldn’t see into the shower. Second had a window smack in the middle on the long side with frosted glass. Third and fourth had no windows and I hated those bathrooms. Current one has a huge window with a 20-inch tiled inset, glass blocks with a little 8x4 venting window in the middle. I love it!
I currently live in an apartment with one, however the lower sill is at about shoulder level, I’m on the third floor, and it’s made of textured glass blocks plus a small textured-glass panel that opens a few inches (and is high enough to be just above my head).
I was on a movie location, though, where there was a large and perfectly clear glass window smack alongside the tub. If you stood in the tub, it went from about knee level to above my head. Several people commented on the oddity of the arrangement – you could see the entire large yard and a good portion of two streets from the window. It was a very old and dilapidated house, though, and was slated to be torn down sometime after we were done shooting in it.
The house I spent the latter half of my childhood living in had a frosted bathroom window. The house was built in the late 1800s, however, and the bathroom orginally was a pantry, so that probably explains why there was a window at all.
In the apartment building that I grew up, corner apartments (the bigger ones) have windows in the part where the shower/bathtub is. The windows are “Miami style”, the ones you have to roll the blinds up and down and they’re metal. There is also a screen (to prevent mosquitoes from entering). That place was built in 1960s, so it is quite old. And yea, I lived in one of the corner apartments. My parents usually just closed the window when the shower was in used, and kept it open the rest of the time.
The house I had in Austin had a shower/tub that had lots of glass bricks around it.
Our house has a very small window in the wall behind the shower/bathtub. There’s no fan in the bathroom, so it’s for ventilation more than light. Reminds me – I need to put some CLR on it – our hard water really scums it up.
I haven’t read the two pages of responses, but YES I do have a real working window in my shower. It’s a nice DIY-remodeled house sectioned into apartments. That may explain it. It comes in handy post shower to nullify all the steam in the air.
I’ve lived in two places that had a window over the bathtub. One was a 1920s house divided into two apartments (one up and one down), and the other was a 1950s suburban tract house. Neither house had a fan in the bathroom.
My house does not, but my grandparents’ house has a (high) window over the tub in the downstairs bath.
I remember one in a similar position at a house of a friend of a friend’s in Chicago.
If the “ground floor” is at sufficient elevation above the ground outside, it’s not so bad.
I live in an apartment complex that was built in the early sixties, and I have a window in the bath/shower. I love it, lets all the steam out and its nice to have a cool breeze coming in while taking a hot shower. The window is frosted but its too high up to see into anyway.
Its also screened so I leave it open all the time when weather permits. I keep my shampoo and liquid soap bottles on the window ledge.
Our master bathroom has a BIG shower and no tub; there is a window in the shower but since its on the second floor, there is no chance of being seen unless you are about eight feet tall. It is made of frosted glass and opens sideways. The shower is big enough that a second window could / should have been installed. Our second bathroom is completely inside the house; no windows there.
I’ve seen lots of these but they are usually in apartments, above the first floor, tiny, high up, or frosted, etc.
The house that I grew up in had a long window at the end of the bath tub before a remodel bricked up half the window and moved the tub. The house was built in 1860 and the bathroom was originally part of the dining room.
I lived in one house built in 1902 that had a similar set up, where the bathroom was an afterthought. You could see our side yard and the neighbor’s house from it if you opened the curtain.
Yet another old house (built in 1890), made into a duplex (one up, one down), had a small window over the clawfoot tub.
When my ex and I built a house in 1988, we put a skylight over the garden tub in the master bath. Some nights, I would kick back for a long soak and watch the squirrels in the tree above the skylight.
Our house has a window in the bathroom, but it’s frosted. Being Tokyo, there’s not much space between the houses, and someone would have to work hard to get back there.
My parents’ house has a small frosted one, and my old apartment had a large one that opened right onto the common hallway (had a few conversations with the neighbors while sitting in the bath)
This shower window really made me wonder what the designer was thinking.
yes there is a window. it is small and only visible to the neighbours using the stairs to the roof deck. the roof deck was added 100 years after the houses were built.
so before that no chance of anyone seeing you bathe in the cast iron claw foot.
now the houses across the alley from my house. most of them have the bathroom at the back of the house. unless they have replace the windows they are rather big windows. some people have redone the interiors or have curtains/frosted glass, others do give the neighbours a show, during the night or early morning.
There’s a loft on the west side, in Chelsea or the West Village, that’s been converted into a rentable event venue. So far as I could tell, it’s not been remodeled to the extent of moving walls around. The bathroom had a sunken tub, which looked out over the Hudson by way of a floor to ceiling window. No privacy concern (short of guys in Jersey with high powered binoculars, I guess) but a fantastic view.
We have a five-foot wide narrow window in our master bathroom shower. It’s on the third floor of the house and we live out in the boonies, so peekage isn’t a problem. The window also has a deep plant shelf and my myriad orchids protect my nakedness from, say; giraffes that might have escaped from the zoo. I like the natural light that floods in, it helps during our long rainy season in the winters.
Got one in the upstairs full bath, but it looks out over a meadow backed by forest and is high up enough that you’d need to climb some trees to try to get a view. In DC I lived in two apartments that had windows in the bathroom - one right next to the bathtub equipped with Venetian blinds. Which were pretty grody. The other one was kinda weird; the bathroom looked out into what probably used to be a small outdoor balcony which was later closed in, so the result was a completely interior bathroom that had a window! Mine wasn’t the only one; a buddy of mine who lived in the same building had the same arrangement.