Name: Hotel bathroom doors.
Age: Solid doors have existed since ancient Egypt.
Appearance: Increasingly flimsy, possibly nonexistent.
Hang on, I’ve been in many hotel bathrooms in my life and I can tell you they all shared one characteristic: a door. Well, no longer. The Wall Street Journal has exposed the terrifying slide towards extinction of proper, solid, closing doors for hotel bathrooms. They are being replaced with “sliding barn doors, curtains, strategically placed walls and other replacements”.
“Sliding barn doors” – what are we, animals, forced to do our business for all to see? It gets worse. “Some hotels have been moving the sink and shower into the bedroom and enclosing the toilet in glass or placing it in cubby-like space,” according to Bjorn Hanson of New York University’s Jonathan M Tisch Center of Hospitality.
Nothing says romantic mini-break like struggling to defecate quietly in a glass box as your beloved turns on the TV and tries desperately to dissociate. Yep. “This door is designed to either move your relationship forward or end it,” as the comedian Becca Herries put it, standing in front of a flimsy sliding number. “You couldn’t see the fine details, but you could see everything else,” a victim of a frosted glass door told the Journal, chillingly. “I love my husband but I don’t want to see him use the restroom.”
Even worse if you’re sharing with a colleague. I assume this outrage is a cost-cutting measure? As the Journal explains: “In the eyes of a chief financial officer, the humble door can look like a money pit.” Proper bathrooms with doors require the costly likes of lightbulb changes and door handle maintenance.
I bet chief financial officers have toilet doors in their houses. Of course, but whither shareholder value?
But surely it’s a false economy – won’t guests vote with their feet (and other body parts)? Not all of them. “If the toilet is in the middle of the room, I don’t really care,” one nihilistic hotel guest said.
Each to their own, I suppose. But the door people must fight their corner. Don’t worry, they already are. The Bring Back Doors website is a crowdsourced database of door heroes and villains. It gives a privacy rating and door description for hotels in various cities, from “confirmed bathroom door” to the dread “Zero privacy: no door, no wall, or wall with a window”.
And who’s behind this vital public service? Sadie Lowell, a digital marketer, who bears the psychic scars of a hotel trip with her father in 2024 where the pair shared a room with no bathroom door. “Suddenly I wasn’t just mildly inconvenienced as I had been in previous no-door situations,” Lowell writes on the site. “I was angry.”
Do say: “I’ve booked us a sexy bargain hotel break, babe! Pack some nice undies and a blindfold …”
Don’t say: “… Also earplugs. Definitely remember those.”
