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LITTLE ROOM, BIG DEAL

Restaurant loos are now seen as a key part of the eating-out experience. Peter York flushes out five different approaches ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

The English-speaking world tends to worry more about the semantics of the unspeakable place—is it a toilet, a loo, a lavatory, a lav, a bog, a restroom, a bathroom or a WC?—than its aesthetics. But never mind what it’s called, the loo is a hugely important part of a restaurant. It’s central to what marketing-speakers call the “total customer experience”: it tells you what the restaurateur really thinks of you; it’s a proxy for the kitchen (if the loo’s dirty, the kitchen will be too); and it is the acid test for the success of the overall look. If, as you leave the dining room and head off down the corridor, you find the decor regressing from Absolutely Now to Last Refurbished When Reagan Got In, the whole brand will be compromised. In an American survey of 2008 quoted by Tourism Review, an online trade site, 88% of respondents thought a restaurant’s loos were “very important”, and 29% said they would never return if they found something nasty in that particular woodshed.

Things have changed. Back in the 1970s the decoration in British restaurants, whatever there was of it, usually ran out at the top of the basement stairs. After that things became basic and often borderline dangerous—many restaurants were converted out of narrow 18th- and 19th-century houses with precipitous stairs that were especially tricky to negotiate with a bucket of Rioja sloshing inside you. Going to the bathroom took you into the restaurant’s backstage area—past the kitchen, where you might well see what you’d rather not through a wired-glass door—and on to the loo, assembled, without a thought, from Texas Homecare. The style was cut-price domestic: utilitarian sheet-vinyl flooring; basic basins, taps with moulded clear plastic tops and red or blue foil indicators for hot and cold. One tap was usually stuck, so the water either boiled or froze. The floor would be wet, and namelessly smelly.

The only restaurants where you could find reliable high-end lavatorisation before the mid-1980s were in smart hotels; in London, led by the Savoy Hotel Group’s marvels of the ancient world—the Savoy itself, Claridge’s and the Connaught. Rodney Fitch, a doyen of big-environment designers who has worked on shops, restaurants and offices around the world for the past 40 years, identifies the “monumentality” of the Claridge’s lavs as the gold standard. “The original Edwardian or Art Deco public rooms in those hotels were grand conceptions: purpose-built, high-investment every inch of the way”—right through to the lavs. New 1930s technologies and fashions were combined with practically everlasting materials—marble and mosaic, macassar and mahogany, Venetian glass and nickelled brass. It wasn’t until the next big-investment restaurant boom that anyone spent anything like so much time and money on the smallest room.

Coming out of the 1989-92 slump, a new generation of restaurant entrepreneurs—design-literate types who knew their way around an ad agency or an investment bank—started to commission ambitious designers to make big-statement, faith-in-the-future restaurants with a Look and a Story. In London they followed the international money to Mayfair and St James’s—like Coast in Mayfair, with a design by Marc Newson, which had a funny Organic Modern ceiling (were those mushrooms or spaceships?), or Avenue on St James’s, which pioneered an over-scaled look of bright-white paint, glass bricks and blonde wood. This was the workplace of Eurotrash and American hedge-fund boys, Russian oligarchs, and top bananas from Hong Kong, people who had, when it came to the lavs, international standards. Global new money didn’t see any fun in the pong of pee; it wanted Cool Britannia to be strictly wipe-clean.

The restaurateurs knew it. Smart restaurants are now as fashion-driven in their loos as front of house, maintaining the brand statements and keeping the design magic going all the way to the flush, while also observing every Geneva Convention of obsessive hygiene and showing as many Key Value Indicators—ie, obviously expensive materials—as possible. And there are several distinct ways of doing it.

LOO ONE:   EUROCRAT-CORPORATE
Painfully new, logical and clinical, this style of loo makes customers feel they’re still at work in La Défense or en route at London City Airport. It is over-sized, over-lit and full of eminently sensible materials: the ranks of basins are set in light, bright, stone-ish composites, the floors are laid with large, white or cream tiles, and anything metal is Germanic-looking stainless steel. There are opaque glass doors to the cubicles, with seats and covers in heavy black or white matt super-composite. Anything not relevant to the business in hand—graven images, cheerful textiles, wood—is utterly banned. Found across Europe in second-tier commercial/residential developments with a restaurant on the ground floor; particularly prevalent in Brussels. 
 
LOO TWO:  SOHO METRO
A British look with Frenchified overtones, spreading virus-like from London to New York via Ilse Crawford’s interiors for the Soho House group of clubs and hotels. The loos at its new Dean Street Townhouse restaurant have beautiful—salvaged, or perfect reproduction?—double basins, Bisto-brown joinery, surfaces of mousetrap Carrara marble honed flat (shiny is vulgar Dubai hotel-ish), horizontal, bevelled, Paris Metro white tiles, and a black and white ceramic-tiled floor. It’s vaguely evocative of all kinds of styles, from Arts and Crafts to 1950s clubland, without being definably any of them. Look east and you’ll find similar in the City—the new Galvin La Chapelle off Bishopsgate has a dark-wood-light-tile combo, plus the mousetrap marble; though it’s rather let down by the bowl-basins, which stopped being leading-edge in 2002.

LOO THREE:  HAUT SLOANE
A whimsical, marginally cleaned-up version of the loo in an English country house, this will be wallpapered, wooden-floored and full of sporting trophies (especially field ones). It will have amusing small pictures—Victorian dogs, cartoons, old photographs of groups from school and Oxbridge. Miniaturised references to Pall Mall clubland—bits of mahogany and green marble round the basins—give the feeling that someone trusted will brush you down and manage the soap (bars of real stuff). Found in all the former Mark Birley establishments in London—Annabel’s, Mark’s Club, Harry’s Bar, etc—and in country-house hotel restaurants.

LOO FOUR: MONUMENTAL
The high point of restaurants in seriously listed, famous buildings, particularly old, European hotels: places where the original installations were so massively expensive and positively filmic that they’ve been featured in books about architecture. In London Claridge’s and the Dorchester have the look: large, historic and sophisticated combinations of the original Haut Deco (mosaic floors, novel 1930s plumbing, Venetian glass) with careful restorations and renewals, cleverly done to balance the needs of conservationists with the International Rich’s demands for pristine non-porosity.

LOO FIVE:  THE TALKING POINT
These are designed to generate insiderish dinner-party talk; each will be different in some extreme way. In London Sketch has at least two sets. The first are white, free-standing space pods with glass-fibre-y doors that don’t seem quite secure. The second are decorated in nightclub camp: lined with textured, silver-giltish stuff, there are tiny, useless bowl-basins in coloured glass and the loo paper is suspended in a sort of jewelled swing. It’s all very entertaining, but hopeless for a wash and brush-up—and perhaps already a bit passé. Two of the globe’s best-known Talking Point loos—the waterfall urinal at the pre-refurb Royalton Hotel in New York, and the infinity glass stall at the top of the Peninsula hotel, which gave men the illusion of carelessly peeing over Hong Kong—have now been replaced with less foxing facilities. They had to go, because people didn’t know where to go. 

(Peter York is a market researcher and author of "Style Wars". He wrote the Autumn 2009 cover story on branding.)

Picture Credit: Liz Artindale