How many bathrooms do you really need? The rise of single-bathroom shame

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You have to feel for Kevin McCloud. Over 25 years at the helm of Channel 4’s Grand Designs, the long-suffering presenter has had a front-row seat to some of the most grandiose and nonsensical homebuilding projects this country has seen. He has sighed patiently as yet another couple wonder whether it might have been a good idea to get planning permission before constructing a gargantuan glass box in an area of natural beauty. His eyebrows have shot up in alarm as, say, a family blow what’s left of their budget on a niche type of stone paving. He has seen great folly and hubris at first hand. But after this quarter century on the front line of Britain’s home design efforts, there’s one trend that has really provoked him: our overabundance of bathrooms.

Speaking to the Radio Times to mark his show’s anniversary, McCloud laid out his dislike of “houses with more toilets than physical occupants”, and posed the question: “Why do people judge the status of a house by how many toilets you can offer your guests? It’s absurd.” It’s not the first time that he has railed against this phenomenon. Back in 2019, he told The Sunday Times that he could not get his head around it. “You can’t use more than one [bathroom] at a time and, frankly, you only need to use it four or five times a day,” he said. “Estate agents have always sold houses by the number of bedrooms; soon they’ll do it by the number of WCs.”

His prediction doesn’t actually seem that outlandish. In 2017, Direct Line surveyed UK estate agents to try to get a handle on how much value an extra bathroom could add to a home: they found that on average, an additional loo could boost a three-bedroom house’s price by as much as £12,000. For a four-bed, it could add almost £17,000. They also looked into the ideal bedroom-to-bathroom ratio, with the agents surveyed concluding that a three-bed home would ideally boast 1.8 bathrooms (how does one calculate 0.8 of a bathroom? Everything apart from a bidet? Sub-optimal water pressure in the shower?)

How did a straightforward one-bathroom set-up come to be a source of interiors shame? Brits certainly have a love of judging each other’s status and prosperity based on inconsequential lifestyle signifiers: it’s practically a national pastime for our class-obsessed country. So just as we might secretly read hidden meanings into someone’s choice of Aesop hand soap by the sink (pricey!), clawfoot bath (pretentious!) or “Live, laugh, love” print hanging by the mirror (naff!), we can cast aspersions based on the abundance of expensive en suites that a homeowner has decided to install. Any home improvements involving plumbing are so cost-intensive that they’re inevitably a status symbol, but a bathroom is less of an investment of time, money and space than, say, a shiny new kitchen, making it that little bit more accessible.

An excess of bathrooms – for example, if “four people live in the house and put in six toilets”, as McCloud said to illustrate this madness in his Sunday Times interview – feels like people-pleasing gone mad. It’s an extreme case of preparing for all eventualities and eliminating any minor inconvenience for hypothetical house guests. If we have visitors and then for some reason they have to wait a few minutes to go to the loo or use the shower in the morning, then we might be prone to start wringing our hands and thinking that we are terrible hosts; by this not very cost-effective logic, it’d be better to spend more money on more bathrooms than possibly risk such a faux pas. I’ve noticed myself apologising for my one humble loo when I have people to stay – despite the fact that it’d be frankly ridiculous for me to have more because I’m just one person. It’s also the first non-damp bathroom I’ve ever had the joy of renting, which perhaps speaks volumes about the gulf in priorities between homeowners and renters. The latter group tends to want something with decent ventilation and a working flush.

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There’s also a sense that, in decking out our homes with a lav for every eventuality, we’re trying to keep up with interiors norms on the other side of the Atlantic. You only have to watch an episode of Netflix’s fever dream property show Selling Sunset to see that, in high-end American homes at least, the bathroom-to-bedroom ratio is more like two to one. A “primary” suite (that’s a master bedroom, in the series’ specific language) often has two bathrooms adjoining it; seeing a floor of a house without its own toilet would provoke disdain from the Oppenheim Group’s glamorous realtors.

I wonder, too, whether there’s a more specific reason why millennial homeowners might be quick to get on board with a multi-bathroom home. They’re probably all bearing the psychological wounds of spending years in flat shares where the number of housemates vastly exceeds the number of facilities. If one of your fellow residents happens to steal your slot on the unwritten morning bathroom rota, you end up missing your train, being late for work, and having your whole day spiral out of control. No wonder they might want to avoid the spectre of bathroom-related traffic issues once they (finally) have their own space.

Trends tend to come around in circles, so there’s a high likelihood that one day, the nation will tilt towards McCloud’s way of thinking, and having an embarrassment of bathrooms will be deemed terribly overblown and excessive. And if, in the meantime, you’re suffering from single-bathroom shame when you have visitors? Just remember that fewer bathrooms equates to less time scrubbing toilet bowls and shining limescale-crusted taps.