Would you try this bedroom trend? Photo / News.com.au
By James Weir
There are many things in this world I don't understand.
Men who still have eyebrow rings.
Baristas who align the sip hole of the lid with the crease in the cardboard cup so the coffee leaks on you.
Couples who insist on going to Indian restaurants for romantic dates and then proceeding to sleep in the same house together.
That last point is the one that perplexes me most of all. It's a terrible idea and should never be done. The imagined outcome is bad enough. But, thanks to a hip new design trend, the situation has become a whole lot worse, reports News.com.au.
Imagine, if you will, that couple - the same one at the Indian restaurant - finishing their garlic naan and chicken tikka masala. They make their way back to their beautiful home at the end of the night. Perhaps they move into the bedroom to finish the romance.
But things come to a halt. One of them politely excuses themselves.
The man clambers off the bed and walks to the bathroom. He doesn't need to leave the room to get there. But not because it's a convenient ensuite. He bounds off the bed, takes one step and reaches the toilet.
"Don't look at me," he says, humiliated as he holds up a towel in front of him to try to fashion a makeshift wall.
In April, a four-bedroom Melbourne home - complete with a solar-heated pool, sprawling entertainment areas and ducted heating - sold for $1 million.
And now it's being trolled on Reddit because one of the rooms has a toilet just metres from the bed. Granted, in this situation, a thin panelled venetian folding door was installed in a sad and frantic attempt by the previous owner to gain some privacy but the efforts would have been futile.
It seems this trend is only happening in otherwise beautiful homes - houses where both the developer and the buyer have money. They splash out for marble bench tops and pools and six car garages but the bathroom wall is where they decide to skimp? That basic wall around the toilet is deemed a luxury that is just simply ridiculous.
It's the design equivalent of rich people buying $600 jeans with a bunch of holes in them. It's slum chic and it's all the rage.
Fun fact: Philip Tierno, a microbiologist at New York University, warns that toilet germs can fly as high as 4.5m if the lid is not slammed firmly shut. Think about that while you rub your face into your pillow tonight.
I bet real estate agents have had to become real crafty in how they sell these homes to people - perhaps telling buyers it's not just a toilet next to the bed but rather the room comes furnished with Japanese-style bedside tables.
"Did you see Jennifer Aniston's Bel Air home in Architectural Digest? Her bed's flanked by two bidets. A 'his and hers' situation," an agent might say.
What offends me most is this is not what Gough Whitlam - Australia's 21st Prime Minister and reigning toilet king - fought for when he insisted the Commonwealth resolve many of the problems that plagued suburbs around our capital cities by installing indoor plumbing.
In 1965, 45 per cent of Australians lived in homes which were not connected to sewerage systems which meant their only option was to have an outside toilet.
Gough fought for the everyday man and woman to stop chucking a whiz-whaz in a hole in the ground and to do it indoors while scrolling through Instagram.
"It will be said of Gough Whitlam that he found the outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane unsewered, and left them fully flushed," NSW's late premier Neville Wran once said.
This modern-day development of having a toilet directly in the bedroom makes a complete mockery out of the grand achievement and flies in the face of the intended civility indoor plumbing was supposed to bring to our nation.
While I have no sympathy for couples who have gone out of their way to incorporate this trend into their homes, I do feel for the ones who embark on a weekend away only to find their boutique room is severely open-plan. Any couple who survives a few days with Japanese-style bedside tables is seriously in it for the long haul.
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