Bar Bathrooms Have Gotten Really Weird
Secret bars, stall-based soundtracks, and free Champagne pours are just some of the washroom amenities in bars and clubs these days.
By Adam Erace
WANDER INTO THE W hotel in Mexico City’s posh Polanco district and fall down the rabbit hole. Low-slung banquettes hide in laser-cut birdcages that stretch to the ceilings. Textured glass makes straight lines ripple like fun-house mirrors. Mannequin-mask chairs surround an upside-down pyramid inscribed with secret messages that materialize at night. Part of a $100 million dollar redesign of the brand’s “Living Room” lobbies, nothing is quite as it seems at this hotel-cum-art house carnival, where New York designers nemaworkshop saved the unexpected surprise for the public bathrooms: a secret tequila bar.
"We wanted to create pockets of unexpected interaction, hence a unisex bathroom, while adding a layer of local culture and continuing to enhance the vibe of the Living Room," says Martin Ablaza, Design Manager at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.
In the hospitality industry, lavatories are getting love unseen since the era of tuxedoed attendants manning veritable pop-up bodegas of drug store swag. We’re not talking about baskets of Binaca and Drakaar Noir, but intelligent amenities and design choices that make going one or two an extension of the brand experience.
From left: The bathrooms at Boca Grande, W Hotel Mexico City, and Le Diplomat.
In the case of sex-segregated restrooms, women have been spoiled for a long time, while us guys have been relegated to charmless troughs that make relieving oneself feel like a punishment. (Would it kill someone to give us a goddamn chaise lounge?) Female-only amenities still dominate today: LES nightclub Beauty & Essex famously pours free Champagne in their ladies’ room; DC’s hottest restaurant, Rose’s Luxury, combats mid-meal fly-aways with thoughtful bobby pins. But we’re finally getting some attention thanks to the rise of co-ed washrooms like the “Bains Douches” at Boca Grande in Barcelona, where you might catch a set by resident DJ Brightside.
Music is also part of the bathroom experience at Liberty Market restaurant outside Phoenix, where individual stalls features their own design and corresponding iPod soundtrack. “The stalls are designed so that when you close the door, the music is activated,” explains owner, Joe Johnston, whose 19-year-old son, James, designed the black-and-maroon men’s-only pod with a tattoo parlor vibe and “Southern California meets Quentin Tarantino playlist.”
The naughty wallpaper at Parc in Philadelphia
The most common amenity of the new-school restroom: some well-placed “artistic” porn. Think rear-view pin-up murals at The Forge in Miami and in Brooklyn, Qi Thai Grill's glass display case of ceramic dolls in various coital poses. At Stephen Starr’s brassiere, Parc, in Philadelphia, and its DC sister, Le Diplomat, the men’s rooms are papered in vintage nudes designer Shawn Hausman sourced from Parisian flea markets. Should any of this upset your female significant other, just point her in the direction of Bang Bang in San Diego’s Gaslamp district, where the ladies’ room is covered in pictures of Ryan Gosling.
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