“I don’t know about you, but we probably had one bathroom between five or six of us when I was growing up,” says Robin Chatwin, an estate agent. “It’s certainly very different now.”
These days, at least in the comfortable corner of south-west London where Chatwin heads the residential properties sector for the agent Savills, buyers seeking a family home look for an en suite bathroom for the principal bedroom “at the very least”, he says, and ideally for their children’s bedrooms, too.
“I’ve worked in my office for 35 years now and there’s been a massive change. Before it was just all about bedrooms, and if there was one or two bathrooms, everyone was very happy. But everyone’s view has changed.
“Frankly, the more the merrier is what people would say. If they could have an en suite for every bedroom, they’d be very happy.”
Mark Breffit, a senior adviser for top-end sales at the agent Hamptons private office, agrees. “Everyone seems to be bonkers for bathrooms – and this trend is no way confined to prime central London.” Even in Victorian and Edwardian terraces, he says, “the desire for a first-floor suite with a walk-in wardrobe and en suite is increasingly prevalent”.
A cloakroom here, an en suite there – it is a situation the Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud considers ridiculous. In an interview with Radio Times, McCloud is especially irritated by “houses with more toilets than physical occupants. Why do people judge the status of a house by how many toilets you can offer your guests? It’s absurd.”
Most people, of course, do not have unlimited space or funds to put an extra loo on every floor – and in plenty of properties, particularly houses in multiple occupation, where as many as five renters may share a bathroom, the lengthy queue outside the bathroom door is still a daily ritual.
But among homeowners, British toilet inflation is not confined to the buyers with the biggest budgets, according to Chatwin, who says those looking for two-bed flats now frequently ask for a second bathroom to help rent the spare room.
Recent research by Savills found that across the market, British buyers are prepared to pay a significant premium for extra bathrooms, with asking prices per square foot 20% higher for homes with two bathrooms compared with those with just one. Strikingly, an extra bathroom in a one-bedroom flat adds significantly more value per square foot than an extra reception room, the estate agent says.
What is going on? The location and quantity of one’s toilet facilities may be an architectural problem, but it has always been a marker of social status, says Melanie Backe-Hansen, a historian and broadcaster specialising in the history of houses.
Before the mid-19th century, she notes, few houses in Britain had an indoor toilet, their occupants relying on privies, earth closets and buckets until a technological leap in plumbing revolutionised the business of doing one’s business. Toilets, at least for the aspirant middle class, moved indoors – although, notes Backe-Hansen, “in a lot of the larger houses in the country, they didn’t have indoor toilets for many years because they had servants to deal with it”.
For today’s elite, bathroom showiness is no less prevalent: a house bought by Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez during their recent brief marriage reportedly had 10 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms. The US habit of listing properties by their bedroom and bathroom numbers, seen in luxury property shows such as Netflix’s Selling Sunset, may also have influenced the growing trend in Britain, Chatwin believes.
But if status is clearly a factor in increasing bathroom numbers as household incomes have risen, comfort is, too. The most remarkable thing about our domestic toilet habits, says Backe-Hansen, is the speed at which they have changed. In 1967, a quarter of homes in England and Wales still lacked either a bath or shower, an indoor WC, or a sink with hot and cold water. By 1991 that figure was 1%.
“It wasn’t long ago that a lot of housing didn’t have internal bathrooms, or just had a loo out the back of the kitchen,” she says. “That expectation we now have of fixtures and fittings, and all the lovely shiny bathrooms that we have now – they were much less common only 50 … years ago. Things have drastically changed.”