Interior Design & Decor

The modern bathroom is more than a necessity – it’s a luxury in our lives, and a place to relax after a long, hard day. So it’s sometimes hard to remember that there were times when elegant bathroom suites and sleek bathroom furniture just didn’t exist.

However, you need to go back a long way…while bathroom suites have been a common fixture in our homes for less than a hundred years; people were first dunking themselves in baths as much as 3000 years ago. In those days, it was more about religious beliefs than simply hygiene, when people needed to cleanse themselves before taking part in rituals. The baths they used bore little resemblance to the bathroom furniture we know in the 21st century, of course – often they were communal facilities used by a whole community.

In Asia, they could be a chilly experience because the water used was cold, while Europe and America both opted for the more comfortable steam bath.Bathroom suites of a sort first began to be seen in homes round about 2800 BC, when toilets were invented in some places and placed on top of chutes in the walls. But some homes had dedicated bathing rooms where the bath was made of brick – the earliest kind of bathroom furniture.

Royalty always knew how to bathe properly, though, although not always frequently – Queen Elizabeth the First was known as a very clean woman because she bathed in her own bathroom suite once a year: “even when she did not need it.” Another, earlier royal, installed the first proper bathtub in his palace in Crete – a piece of bathroom furniture that looked similar to those we have in our own bathroom suites today even though it was plumbed in the year 1700BC.

The Romans were famed for their baths and bathroom furniture, and had lavish facilities that could genuinely called bathroom suites – although the bathroom furniture was on a grander scale than modern-day bathers are used to. The Romans had separate rooms for dry and damp heat, and cold baths – although they also had huge baths where people would lounge at their leisure to relax and debate. Not many modern bathroom suites – however expensive or well-designed – are intended to hold hundreds at the same time!

We started to scrub up with soap in the Middle Ages, although little existed in the way of bathroom furniture then. Public baths gradually went out of fashion, though, and by the 17th century most people preferred to bathe alone, creating special rooms with the kind of bathroom furniture we might start to recognise, with cabinets, dressers and basins, jugs for water and toilet-type facilities (although these needed the services of a servant to be emptied).

Sir William Cavendish pioneered the bathing room after the English civil war, although bathroom suites were not yet coming together in the fashion we enjoy now. A major step in that direction was made by American John M. Kohler of the Kohler Company, who recognised a growing market for bathroom furniture of a particular kind and modified a horse trough to sell as a bath.

But like many things, it was the Industrial Revolution that first truly prompted innovation in bathroom suites and bathroom furniture. Industry was a grimy business in itself, but it paid for the rise of a rich middle class of entrepreneurs who were able to pay for new mechanised bathroom furniture such as the flush toilet – which was designed into a thing of beauty by the Victorians with decorated porcelain and polished wood far more elaborate than anything in 21st century bathroom suites. These newly-wealthy people could afford to have plenty of hot water at home, and new ideas in plumbing saw the genesis for the first time of real bathroom suites with bath, washbasin and maybe even toilet situated in a special private room away from the rest of the house – although poorer families were still making do with a earth closet at the end of the back yard. Elegant bathroom furniture in exotic woods complemented rich men’s bathroom suites and kept many craftsmen in business.Moving on to the last century, many people’s ‘bathroom suites’ were simply a tin tub in front of the fire – and their bathroom furniture was the kitchen table. By the Sixties, though, matters had improved so most people had proper bathrooms with genuine bathroom suites and real bathroom furniture. Always white until the Seventies came along, with bathroom suites in exotic avocado green!

And today? Bathroom furniture can even include a built-in television, while bathroom suites and baths range from deliciously retro in cast-iron to sleek, cool porcelain, steel and even copper and marble. In other words, we’re up to our necks in hot water – and loving it.