Trophy Bathrooms, Manhattan Style

A bathroom with a view at Midtown Manhattan's brand-new 432 Park Avenue

Trophy bathrooms.

You've heard of trophy wives, right?  And trophy homes?  Well, when it comes to trophy homes, just about every room gets blinged-out and hyper-accessorized.  New rooms also get added, such as media rooms, gift-wrapping rooms, and even miniature religious chapels.

For a long time, however, the most private places of any home - trophy or not - had been kept in the shadows.  These rooms were usually small, and were ferreted away into the bowels of a dwelling, tucked out of sight, with discrete views, if any, and absolutely nothing to celebrate.

Well, not any more!  The inner sanctum of personal - and often undignified - physical maintenance has now become one of the most celebrated rooms in a trophy house.

That humble ceramic-tiled shower with an opaque curtain?  It is now a glass-sheathed, marble-walled "wet room."  The impolite toilet?  It has now been practically re-visioned as a sleek throne.  Instead of being secreted into a corner or closed off by its own louvered door, toilets can now command prime bathroom real estate.

Uninhibited.  Out there.  Brutally honest.  Nothing to hide.  And leaving nothing to the imagination.

Indeed, it's imagination overboard with today's trophy bathrooms.  And the trend isn't just for today's McMansions and upscale exurban tract homes, where bay windows flank sunken bathtubs. 

A few restaurants, bars, hotels, and other commercial establishments have been tinkering with the concept of unconventionally visible public bathrooms for a number of years, but even public bathrooms expect their patrons to remain mostly clothed.

But not so for a number of prime new ultra-luxury residential towers in New York City.

For generations, the New York City residential bathroom has been designed for cramped, discrete utility, and if they had a window, it was tiny, and faced a back alley.  Today, however, privacy is for commoners.  If only the little people pay taxes, Leona Helmsley's infamous quote could be reinterpreted today as being "only the little people have little windows in their bathrooms."

Witness the pictorial essay compiled by the New York Times of some very immodest, very glassy, and very view-filled bathrooms currently being offered in the city's most expensive residential projects.  At what is perhaps the city's newest celebrity tower, 432 Park Avenue, you can purchase a brand-new apartment with at 10' x 10' plate glass window centered in front of your pod-shaped bathtub, and a glass wall hiding very little of your shower space and toilet area.

From your bath pod, you'll be able to peer down the corner
of 215 Chrystie Street

If such a spectacle isn't enough for you, there's the pod-shaped bathtub - no rectangular tub-and-shower combos at these price points - tucked into the corner of another celebrity building being literally erected with glass corners.  Which, yes, means that you can take your bath practically peering over the corner of your apartment building.

Yet another luxury building in Manhattan is remodeling its bathrooms to have two toilets facing each other behind glass walls.

It's as if exhibitionism has become the next rung on society's elitism ladder.  Talk about conspicuous consumption!  Still, if you've got twenty, forty, or ninety million dollars to spend on an apartment, there's only so much marble and African wood that can be purchased to outfit such skyscraper palaces.  At some point, these apartments have to provide the biggest "wow" factor architects and interior designers can imagine.  And when it comes to "wow" factors, how much better can it get than showcasing Manhattan's dazzling skyline?

Enter Manhattan's take on the trophy bathroom, which outclasses anything you'll find on the ground in suburbia, simply because you need the verticality of these sky mansions to pull off the desired effect.  Like a Realtor quoted in the Times article says, wealthy homebuyers in Manhattan have always wanted a view from their living room; now, they also want a view from their bathroom.  And when it comes to views, Manhattan can certainly deliver.

So what if the bathroom offers some of the best views?  Remember, only the little people would be intimidated by so much glass when they're getting into and out of a bathtub.  Or off of a toilet.

Besides, it's not like these glass bathrooms are going to be on low floors, where the only view will be of other buildings - and their occupants.  It's also not entirely clear how many of these new apartment towers are being constructed with such transparent trophy bathrooms.  It could be that the market for such exhibitionistic elitism is smaller than developers and Realtors say it is.  Then, too, how many of these glass-walled bathrooms are going to have designer shutters over them anyway, after their naked novelty wears off (which will probably happen by the third night in the homeowner's new apartment)?

According to the Times piece, if this is a bona-fide trend, it can actually be considered quite beneficial for the homeowners of these see-through bathrooms:  considering how self-conscious so much visibility could make the people using them, a rise in physical fitness among Manhattan's penthouse population may be forthcoming.  In what other room in your home are you almost always nude, with lighting that accentuates everything you don't want accentuated, and plenty of mirrors so you can't avoid it?

What's more likely, however, is that the type of people purchasing homes with such bathrooms are people who already possess a personal confidence that has either propelled them into pursuing physical fitness.  Or theirs is a personal confidence that says their personal looks don't matter.  What matters to them is being able to own an apartment where one's bathtub can command a view replicating the vantage point of a ship's captain piloting the mighty USS Manhattan down into New York Harbor.  Looking south from high above Manhattan island, its pointy tip makes the borough look like a nautical vessel plying the waters represented by the Hudson and East rivers.

Of course, that ship effect is lost on any north-facing bathroom.  For buildings near Central Park, there's hardly any northward skyline in which to revel, either.  Besides, what happens when other buildings of equal - or greater - height eventually get constructed near these luxury buildings currently under construction?  Hardly anything ever stays the same in Manhattan's skyline.  Will owners of today's crop of trophy bathrooms have to start going to court against future developers who either want to obstruct views - or, perversely, take advantage of them?

Hey - a boom in trophy bathrooms is one thing.  But a boom in high-powered portable telescopes may be forthcoming as well.

Purchased not only by people living in these skyscraper palaces.  But also by folks living within sight of them.

Need More Happy?

"Do you write happy stuff?  I need more 'happy' in my life."

A friend of mine from church was being honest with me, like friends should be.  He's read some of the things I've written, and noted my penchant for pessimism.

And he's right, isn't he?  You know what "happy" is - something cheerful, optimistic, smile-inducing; in other words, everything everyday news is not.

So, do I write happy stuff?  No, not a lot.  I know that.  And it's a reality that tends to bother me.  I can write all day about stuff that saddens me.  But I have to rack my brain for personal memories that are happy.  I have to scour the Internet to find happy news, or topics that spark my imagination in a lighthearted, uplifting way.

Both my friend and I know the reason why "happy" is elusive.  He readily admits that he needs more happy in his life, and so do I.  And, I suspect, so do you.  But we neither need nor truly want the type of happy that is fleeting, or trite, or based on illusion that everything's right with the world.

To be clear and Biblical, we need to understand that happiness is not joy or peace.  Joy or peace can be present even in the worst of circumstances, whereas happiness is more of an emotion that is dependent upon pleasant, if not fulfilling, circumstances.  The Apostle James says we should "count it all joy" when we're suffering, but he says nothing about being happy with it.

My friend, a born-again Christian, knows that everything isn't right with the world, and so do I, and I hope you do, too.  In fact, that's why he - and I, and you - would like to see more "happy" in our lives.  We know that in this fallen world, there's far too much pain, despair, and plain old unhappiness that we deal with every day.

I had lunch today with somebody who'd just lost a job we'd celebrated him getting only a year ago.  Every day this week, my father, who suffers from senile dementia, has had miserable spells in which he couldn't remember anything about Mom, me, or our family.  I imagine you have news from your family and friends that could be even worse than mine.

Happiness?  No!

A lot of my Republican friends are elated with the results of this past Tuesday's elections, but political euphoria has to be one of the most transitory, temporary, and easily-destroyed sensations on the planet.  Just two years ago, Democrats were giddy at what appeared to be the prospect of a severely crippled GOP.  Tides can turn quickly in a democracy, but pundits on both sides of the aisle tend to forget that.

As quickly as it stormed our national consciousness, Ebola appears to have suddenly evaporated as a major crisis for America.  Even in Africa, experts say the number of new Ebola cases appears to be declining.  Yet it's hard to get happy over that, because 99.99% of us don't know anybody who got sick or died from it.  The only people who may be happy about Ebola's apparent downturn likely are the ones who let the media make them panic about it in the first place.

You want happy?  Real "happy"?  So do I.  But I'm not going to over-drink or over-eat to get some sort of pseudo-happy thing going on in my body.  I can't bring myself to read celebrity websites so I can indulge in a bit of schadenfreude when reading about the romantic misfortunes and fashion flubs of famous people.  I don't have the money to go out and splurge on clothing, technology, or exotic travel that may not be bad for me, but that could only give me a brief high of consumeristic gluttony.

Happy?  Happiness is what so many people want, and spend their lives searching for.  Happiness is one reason people invest their time, energy, and money on religious pursuits, or following a favorite sports team.  The search for happiness is something that can drive athletic people, since endorphins are created naturally by our bodies when we exercise.

Meanwhile, aside from my faith, I tend to find my happiness in things that can't really be purchased, or even earned.  I'm no environmentalist quack, but I can honestly say that big trees with broad canopies make me happy, especially on sunny summer days here in Texas!  Any summer day is usually a happy kind of day when I'm in Maine.  Laughing at a good joke makes me happy.  Admiring classic cars, listening to children play nicely with each other, and listening to really good music can also make me happy.

Sometimes, I write about these experiences with happiness.  But, no, not that often; I know.  Most of the time, I write about things that could make us happy, but that have somehow gotten corrupted by our human penchant to abuse otherwise good things.

So, in a way, I'm still writing about happiness, but I'm writing about it in its absence, rather than its presence.

Okay, that's taking the whole thing too far, isn't it?  Of course, there's no happiness in reading about how happiness is corrupted!

Which brings us back to needing more "happy" in our lives.

"Be ye happy" is not in the Bible.  But that's not a good enough reason not to write about happy things more.  Nevertheless, I can honestly say that when I see "happy," I'll try to write about it.  But it won't be fluffy, or cute, or hollow.  I just can't do fluffy, cute, or hollow.

And when I don't see "happy," I'll be writing about that, too.  Not to be depressing, necessarily, but to point out where we might have had "happy" instead of whatever we got.

Let's say that most of the happiness about which I write is a work in progress!

As for getting more "happy" in your life, the next time you pass by a big tree, slow down and admire it. 

Unfortunately for him, Ronald Reagan has been quoted as saying that "a tree's a tree.  How many more do you need to look at?"

I prefer Martin Luther's take on trees:  "Every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."