Hotel Bathrooms.

You can tell a lot about a hotel from its bathroom. In fact, I would argue that the bathroom is the true star of any hotel stay, because it is the one room where you discover what the management really thinks of you! 

The bedroom may have tasteful lighting and a minibar containing a single can of Pringles that costs more than a family hatchback, but the bathroom is where the truth lives. And the truth is usually: “We want you clean, but we don’t want it to be easy.”

Let’s start with the shower, which in hotels is never a normal shower. At home, you turn a knob and water comes out. Simple. In a hotel, you are presented with a chrome‑plated puzzle box designed by someone who hates humans. There are levers, dials, sliders, buttons, and occasionally a mysterious dangling cord that looks like it might summon room service or possibly the fire brigade.

You step in, naked and optimistic, and begin turning things. Nothing happens. You turn something else. A small jet of water shoots horizontally across the room and hits your towel. You turn another thing. The showerhead coughs once, like an elderly smoker, and then blasts you with water at a temperature normally used to remove barnacles from ships.

You leap backwards, slip on the anti‑slip mat (which is a lie), and grab the nearest surface for stability, which is always a heated towel rail set to the temperature of the Earth’s core. This is the hotel bathroom’s way of saying: “Welcome. You belong to us now.”

Then there’s the shower screen, a piece of glass that covers approximately 11% of the area it needs to cover. No matter how careful you are, the bathroom floor will end up with more water than the average municipal swimming pool. You try to mop it up with one of the towels, but hotel towels are made of a special material that actively repels moisture. You could drop one into the Mariana Trench and it would come back bone dry.

Speaking of towels, hotels always provide three sizes:

1. The “hand towel”, which is roughly the size of a napkin and absorbs nothing.  

2. The “bath towel”, which is large enough to wrap around one thigh.  

3. The “bath sheet”, which is theoretically big enough for an adult human but is stored on a shelf so high you’d need a Sherpa to retrieve it.

And then we come to the toiletries, those tiny bottles that contain exactly one thimbleful of shampoo. The labels are always written in a font so small you need the Hubble telescope to read them. You think you’re washing your hair with conditioner, but no!  it’s actually “Revitalising Body Milk”, which sounds like something produced by a very relaxed cow.

The toilet itself is usually positioned in a location that defies all known principles of ergonomics. Sometimes it’s wedged behind the door. Sometimes it’s at an angle, as if the architect gave up halfway through. Sometimes it’s so close to the wall that you have to sit sideways like a Victorian lady riding a horse.

And let’s not forget the lighting, which comes in two settings:

- Surgical Theatre, where every pore on your face is illuminated with the intensity of a thousand suns.  

- Romantic Dungeon, where you can’t see your own hand, let alone your razor.

Finally, there is the extractor fan, which activates automatically whenever you turn on the light and then continues running for three hours after you’ve left the room, moved out of the hotel, and emigrated to another country.

But despite all this, we love hotel bathrooms. They are chaotic, confusing, occasionally dangerous, but they make us feel like we’re on an adventure. A damp, slippery, slightly scalded adventure but an adventure nonetheless.