Bathrooms in Old Houses Redux

This post  was first written as part of the project of doing up a Renaissance townhouse in the Ore Mountains. Alas, this project, like so many others, never came to pass. However, I think it's interesting in a general sort of way for those interested in doing up an old house.

In an earlier entry I contemplated sense and nonsense of creating a "period" bathroom.

I always found the goal to create a "period" bathroom in a historic house, with the possible exception of Victorian houses, futile. After all, they simply DID NOT HAVE bathrooms in the sense we have today. Roman luxuries don't count. And even if one would be hell-bent on creating a period bathroom older than the Victorian period, I doubt they'd want to carry tubs and hot and cold water to the kitchen every time they feel like bathing, let alone empty nonflushing water closets and dispose of the content.

By mere chance I found a bathroom design that looks "cleaner" than the Tadelakt design and is much less fussy to apply. It may look agressively modern now, but I am sure it will find its place among the timelessly beautiful designs. We may want to add a bathroom or two to the Renaissance house soon, so this is certainly an option:


This is PERFECT! The water disappears in the "shadow gap" between wall and ground. It is, like the other two ground-level showers below, from the "Poresta" line of the German company Illbruck Sanitärtechnik. Who said we Germans don't have good taste?



Those showers are, so to say, invisible and with their clean lines they blend in perfectly with houses that require stark, clean designs -- like Renaissance houses.