Why Do American Houses Have So Many Bathrooms?

My current house has 3 full bathrooms which is really too many for just my wife and I. But, the extra bathroom has come in handy as we have remodeled over time.

- bathrooms are a scarce resource

- usage is not evenly distributed, greatest usage is 1. in the morning and 2. when you are running late :-)

- queues form at critical moments and hold up the entire pipeline (e.g., getting ready for work, school, etc.)

The best way for you, or your potential buyer to resolve this bottleneck is to have more of the bottle-necked resource.

I think a decent rule of thumb is one bathroom per floor, plus one. It really sucks having to wait for a bathroom when you need it, and they take up so little space (especially if it doesn't have a bath/shower) that it makes no sense to skimp. We've used all the bathrooms simultaneously, so it's hard for me to consider having fewer.

But as a friend from Canada put it - they had gaps between houses in his country compared to over here, they would build a small housing estate in those gaps.

But then, it's fascinating to compare buildings and code over the years, country by country. Things like legacy infrastructure, climate and history all come into play and darn interesting.

[EDIT ADD] Note was house of 4 (2x adults 2x children] and outside toilet sure does cut out any morning queues - based upon my experience. Though 2 bedroom - was late teens when I left home that I got a room to myself.

You might find out how common from this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21698533

As you mention, an en suite master bathroom would be incredibly nice, and if we remodel, it's _the_ #1 non-negotiable item on the list. Private bathroom for us, 'clean'/separate bathroom for guests/visitors.

My sister lived in a 4/1 with an odd feature: a toilet on a wooden pedestal in the (full-size) basement. No wall around it, not even a curtain. Just sitting there in a corner.

As she put it "you only need it every once in awhile, but when you need that second toilet, you're REALLY GLAD you have it!

I don't find the proliferation of bathrooms/toilets in large houses surprising at all. If I lived in a 4000-5000sqft mansion, I might not mind a 2-3 minute walk to get to my bedroom at night, but I sure as hell don't want to have to do so every time I have to use the facilities. It simply makes sense to have a toilet and sink, at least, near the rooms you use regularly.

"Problem" is a bit dramatic, but it is annoying to me when a house I'm looking at has, say, "3 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms." Who the heck needs that many bathrooms, and ultimately you're paying for all those toilets, and they're taking up square feet from living areas.

Also, hot take: en suites suck. I don't need to be _that_ close to where I take a crap. Feels like a prison-cell layout.

We always had one bathroom for a family of five (5) growing up and, honestly, there was never an issue with it. Since it was always that way we learned from birth (practically) that you can't hog the bathroom, so everyone learned not to, so nobody ever did. I always toweled off, dressed, and did my hair in my bedroom. There was certainly no reading on the toilet or other activities going on in the bathroom. Plus, it was normal, I can't think of a single person I knew growing up that had multiple bathrooms (grew up poor, everyone lived in older construction, mostly smaller apartments). My dad actually grew up in a family of ten (10) with only 1.5 bathrooms.

Even now friends comment on how little time I spend in the bathroom.

Nowadays I have 1.5 baths, which is usual for this area (old construction). The half bath it totally unnecessary (just myself and my spouse here) but it's sometimes nice not having to go upstairs to pee. And of course the half bath isn't original to the house.

Optimally, I'd say a house should have one toilet on each floor, and at least two toilets and bathrooms.

The main thing for me is that I feel like all the "kids" bedrooms having to share 1 bath is a good thing - learning to share is a valuable thing IMO.

It was booming, and it was richer than it ever had been, but it was very poor by today's standards.

GDP per person in 1950 was 27% of the 2019 level.

And since this always has to be pointed out: That is adjusted for inflation.

https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita/table/by-year

I'd also be interested to know the trend in the percentage of floor space given over to bathrooms, which would fuzz both the number of bathrooms and the increased bathroom size. It seems to me like a lot of space wasted, personally, although I admit it does feel nice to walk into a (rare) beautiful full-sized master bathroom.

You'd expect that wealth to show up in new construction more than in retrofitting every existing home, so bathrooms as a lagging indicator makes sense to me.

Umm, not sure where you got your info but white flight is present in any major Western European city, they just have much better PR about it.

After the 2015 influx of migrants I noticed the segregation even more through some neighborhoods. Once the migrants were settled in one neighborhood, the natives with means quickly moved out to greener pastures making more room for the new guests and the cycle repeated itself.

Whenever I was renting in the expensive districts in Germany I mostly heard German/English spoken on the streets vs. when I was renting in the cheap districts I mostly heard Turkish/Arabic/various Eastern European languages on the streets/shops/doctor's offices and my German friends would ask why I chose to live in a "bad" neighborhood. Answer: because I don't care about the nationality of my neighbors, I live where it suits me the best.

But I get their way of thinking, we are social creatures and we are still driven by tribalism so most people don't want to live/socialize with strangers from vastly different cultures regardless of what lengths someone goes to convince them otherwise. This is universal for humans and not something country specific.

Well, this depends on _where_ the house is built. Building codes vary wildly across the US. You won't find a new house in South Florida built out of wood.

In Texas you will find a lot of new houses with internal wooden frames, but the outside walls are made of solid brick, I think this is called "brick veneer".

In Europe (at least in the UK) it's common for houses/apartments to be shared by many flatmates regardless of the number of bathrooms. 4 seems to be roughly the upper limit on 1 bathroom. 5 bedroom places almost always have 2. And many houses with only 1 bathroom will have a second small toilet-only room.

Is that so? Europe seems to have slightly more than 10 million square kilometers in area and the US slightly less than that. Europe is certainly more fragmented, but looking at thetruesize.com, one can use a better area preserving map projection and it seems that Europe has more space.

(I still agree with your points in general though.)

Relevant quotes are toward the end:

"Well, until the mid-19th century, bathrooms were a rarity. Indeed, for 600 years most people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it.

'Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never' was a common English proverb. In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually.

Robert Hooke, the scientist, washed his feet often (because he found it soothing), but appears not to have spent much time damp above the ankles. So most people fought dirt and odour by either covering it with cosmetics and perfumes or by just ignoring it.

Where everyone stinks, no one stinks. But, then, in the 18th century, suddenly water became fashionable, though only in a medicinal sense. Spa towns cropped up all over the country, and people started adjusting to the idea that they might now safely get wet from time to time.

Washing for the sake merely of being clean was remarkably slow in coming, however. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, coined the phrase 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness' in 1778, he meant clean clothes. With respect to bodily cleanliness, he recommended only 'frequent shaving and foot washing'.

What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realisation that it could be gloriously punishing.

Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning. Rev Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning in 1870.

Showers, too, offered great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.

Increasingly, bathrooms - albeit shared and down the corridor - became standard in hotels, and hoteliers who failed to heed this trend paid a hefty price. Nowhere was that more memorably demonstrated than at the vast Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station in London. Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, the Midland cost the equivalent of £300 million when it opened in 1873, and was a wonder in almost every way.

Unfortunately, Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among 600 bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.

In private homes the provision of bathrooms was hit and miss. The rich proved unexpectedly reluctant to bring them into their lives.

' Bathrooms are for servants,' sniffed one English aristocrat. In existing houses, bathrooms usually took the place of a bedroom, but sometimes were jemmied into alcoves or corners. Baths tended to be of exceedingly variable sizes.

A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse. Moreover, baths were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost more than £100 in 1910 - a price well beyond most households.

The British journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, recalled that, as recently as the late 1950s, she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman's Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms. Why? Because not enough British homes had them - and such articles, it was felt, would only promote envy."

Downside though is I end up spending more time in the bathroom since no one else is waiting to use it and it’s a bit of a quiet space.

And as you say, when we have guests staying we do share and let them have free reign of one bathroom. Makes things much easier to handle. We'd easily sacrifice bedroom space for an en-suite.

Another reason might be the accessibility of traveling. More people are used to staying in a hotel compared to 50 years ago, so when you have a guest you would want to offer them a comparable experience. That includes a private bathroom as you said.

Both of these trends are common to most parts of the developed world, but people in other countries don't have as much space to actually go ahead and build more bathrooms.

"If it's urgent, and all the bathrooms are occupied, turn off the wifi"

I’ve heard that might not be so good for hemorrhoids or hernias or whatever else could be caused by excessive strain placed in that region. I kind of want a raised South or East Asian style squatting toilet since I feel like squatting is better for the body.

We're probably just city folks who don't know what we're missing, but my wife and I rather like being shoulder-to-shoulder at one sink...

The only thing that took long to fix, was when it loaded the water slowly. But that only meant longer waiting between flushing; merely an inconvenience.

Top loaders were popular in the US for a long time, and they generally fill all the way up.

Your source does not call this the average, but the upper limit. Washing machines have a range of sizes you can set them at ranging from small to "super-max". Also a range of durations depending on how many cycles and how much washing is needed.

You'd need to relate it to how much laundry gets washed per gallon.

Also, some parts of the US are semi-tropical and even swamp. Not every state is as worried about conserving water.

Dual toilets have rescued us twice now from inevitable accidents.

No one wants to hold it while the other person is having a nice relaxing poop.

Toilets are a bit trickier, but if you're spending enough time on the toilet for it to be a bottleneck in your hosuehold, you may want to consider adding more fibre to your diet.

Need in the sense that, it improves the quality of life, and it's a worthy expense.

I imagine it's because 1-2 of those would be ensuite to one or more of the bigger bedrooms and/or that one or more aren't full baths.

Our last home, in the southern US, was build in 1980 and two of the 3 bathrooms (all full which is odd) were original and about 35 years old. While the appearance was dated, structurally and mechanically they were sound with no mold, water damage, or other issues. A steam clean of the tile and porcelain, along with a re-caulk and re-grout would have been sufficient to keep them going for quite some time. Our house before that was from 1965 with both bathrooms being original. The metal plumbing had started to fail and there was some rot to the sub-flooring around a toilet but otherwise fully functional and clean. In both cases the bathrooms were like most homes in the US with ceramic tile floors, steel tubs, and tiled shower stalls.

When I think about all the bathrooms I've used while in Europe, most were much newer and all felt like they needed to be redone. The finishes were unlike what's typically done in American bathrooms, some where plastic or vinyl covered while others used wood. They were all small and poorly ventilated, and they all had issues with mold and rot. I'm thinking poor ventilation and choosing materials for style over longevity might be why you feel the need to redo your bathrooms so frequently.

Obviously there are still expensive parts, but we don't rebuild the entire bathroom every 15 years and we don't have to do that rebuild all at once.

And bathtubs, toilets, and sinks last 20+ years easy (it’s porcelain and/or cast iron, what can go wrong?) Replacing the toilet innards is a 1 hour job at most with a $30 repair kit from the hardware store in case the seals wear out or something.

I've lived in most different types of place now (rurally, in the suburbs, in inner city suburbs, in the middle of metro areas) etc and the idea of having to decorate a massive house is something I really can't be bothered with. If I had children I'd want enough space for them, sure, but that's about it.

It's not even about the cost but just the mental overhead of it all, cleaning, all the stuff you accumulate, etc.

Another really, really backwards thing seems to be shower fixtures. If you aren't lucky and find a modern mixing valve, you are likely doomed to experiment with various push, pull, turn-while-pull, push-while-turn-then-pull, turn-until-searing-hot-then-go-on-because-warm-comes-after-hot-on-the-scale moves to get a decent water temperature. And not only is this totally unintuitive, it also differs between every single shower in every single hotel or motel room (especially motels seem to have these weird fixtures).

Just on the general topic of the number of bathrooms increasing surely it could be related to the obesity epidemic. They do seem correlated. People getting fatter and fatter every year, they need to relieve themselves more often and of more material, this all takes time so it goes without saying they would spend more time in bathrooms.

In my 40 years of life in the US the only time I have experienced a clogged toilet is because someone put something down it that did not belong (or the entire plumbing system was backed up do to tree roots or other issue unrelated to toilet design)

> The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”

That is, water does spread disease, and public baths went out of fashion during the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.

Yeah, I have a P-trap in the kitchen space of my single-room flat, in theory for the dishwater; but since I don't have a dishwasher, there's no water and I got sewer smells until it was plugged by rags.

I’ve never heard of this pressure control

Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?

In all cases, we could have done without 1 of the full baths, or the half-bath, without problem. The extra was purely convenience (but appreciated growing up with a sister who could take some time getting ready).

Same in the Boston area...you're either getting an older, reasonably sized home, a new-build condo/apartment, or a new-build McMansion / cookie-cutter development. These new-builds are often much larger than millenials want, bigger than boomers need, and too expensive for their blandness.

My guess is homebuilders simply make a better profit on these huge homes...for now...while the market is upheld...

Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, these all have restrooms and are open to the public. Sometimes they might require a small purchase (like a water bottle). Heck, I was in NYC not too long ago and was surprised to find that all Starbucks have open restrooms (in other cities I've visited sometimes you needed to ask for the key).

The same way I've often read silly threads on reddit mentioning those fecal problems (like after mexican food, it seems like a ritual for us folks to crush the toilet bowl) which don't seem as common or popular in europe.

Middle class Americans (petit bourgeois) might, but probably contract out for at least some of it; middle income Americans probably can't afford to contract out and probably do their own cleaning. But Americans often say the former when they mean the latter, so it's not usually clear what is being discussed.

Oftentimes homes with many small rooms each having private bathrooms were actually designed specifically for the purpose of room rentals, think elderly shared housing type places.