New trend in room planning: bathrooms inside rooms behind sliding walls or even without them

This is what a room looks like in Fletcher Hotel (Amsterdam). Screenshot from video: bring_back_doors / TikTok

Guests choosing hotels in search of peace and comfort are increasingly encountering an unpleasant surprise.

Instead of a separate toilet, people are increasingly finding themselves in rooms where the shower and toilet are separated by sliding doors, frosted glass panels, or even just curtains or partitions.

The main problem with these innovations is that they do not adequately block sounds and smells. And in some cases, they don't even visually conceal what's happening inside.

Additionally, transparent partitions let light through: if one person gets up early and turns on the light in such a bathroom, they inevitably wake the other.

Economy above comfort

Why do hotels take such steps? For economy. Mid-range hotel chains have always operated with small margins, and after the pandemic, the situation became more complicated: business and group trips have not fully recovered, while utility costs soared along with energy prices as a reaction to Russia's attack on Ukraine.

From a financial point of view, conventional doors look like a source of constant expenses: they are expensive themselves, handles break, there are accessibility requirements for opening widths, and separate lighting is needed.

As WSJ writes, architects have tried various options. Sliding pocket doors have mechanisms that are expensive to maintain, curtains collect dust, and the currently popular sliding barn doors on external rails are unreliable in terms of tight closure.

To save space and visually enlarge it, some designers even move the sink and shower directly into the living room, while the toilet is enclosed with glass or placed in a niche.

This trend is causing a strong reaction among tourists. As WSJ notes, jokes have even appeared on social media that such doors "are designed either for you to open new horizons in your relationship, or for those relationships to happily end."

@beccaherries #hotel #traveling #funny

However, some are not laughing at all. Marketer Sadie Lowell was so shocked by the lack of normal doors in a London hotel where she stayed with her father that she launched the "Bring Back Doors" campaign. Based on responses to inquiries, she created a list of hotels, classifying them by level of privacy: from partial to none. More than 500 hotels worldwide have already landed on her "blacklist."

As the publication notes, not everyone considers the absence of traditional bathroom doors a problem. There is a category of guests who don't care where the toilet is – the main thing is that the bed is comfortable. This applies, for example, to those who travel alone. However, for many, privacy remains a basic need. Hotels that ignore this risk losing customers: people will simply take their money to places where the bathroom is still separated by ordinary, opaque doors.

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