History of Bathrooms

Hygiene is an essential part of every successful civilization, and the bathroom is where hygiene begins. Since we design bathrooms, we'd like to take an educational journey through the ages to see how and why they've evolved.

Ancient Greece

The ancient Greeks were known for many things, but their toilets weren't one of them. Their contribution to plumbing wasn't as great as their contributions to the arts or mathematics, but it's still worth a look.

We rarely hear about it, but parts of Greece did have plumbing. The Minoans, who came from the island of Crete and influenced the ancient Greeks, enjoyed their heyday from around 2700 to 1450 BCE. They're cited as the first civilization to use underground plumbing for washing and toilets, which shows how seriously they took personal hygiene.

Among the Greeks, a person was always bathed at birth, at marriage and after death.

Ancient Rome

About 2,000 years ago, a high-ceilinged room beneath one of Rome's most opulent palaces was a busy, smelly space. A bench perforated by about 50 holes the size of dinner plates ran along its walls, likely used by some of the lowest members of Roman society.

The ruins of Pompeii revealed communal bathrooms, some of them beautiful, with frescoes on the walls, sculptures in the corners and rows of holes carved into cold Italian marble.

Interestingly, Roman toilets didn't flush. They were tied into plumbing and sewer systems that often consisted of little more than a small stream of water running continuously beneath the seats.

The Middle Ages

By medieval times, public bathing had largely disappeared in the West, but it continued in the Middle East, where Roman-style bathhouses became known as hammams. Some of the earliest surviving hammams, in modern-day Syria, date back as far as the 12th century, and accounts claim Baghdad alone had thousands of bathhouses at its height.

In the late Middle Ages, crusaders and other travelers who had discovered these baths in the Middle East reintroduced Roman-style public baths to Europe.

In medieval England, public steam baths known as "stews" were popular social meeting places. Stewhouses (more formally, "bagnios") were first established on the south bank of the River Thames in the 12th century. Men and women often bathed together, and some stewhouses even served food. They eventually gained a reputation as brothels and were closed by royal order.

Private toilets began in medieval European castles, which were fitted with "garderobes": typically a stone seat above a tall shaft that drained into the moat.

The 18th Century

Bathing was a luxury most people couldn't enjoy often, mainly because few had access to hot, clean water. Something almost everyone takes for granted today was hard to come by: most bathrooms had no plumbing, so water had to be carried from its source to the tub. The wealthy had servants to do it for them, while everyone else saved bathing for special occasions.

The Birth of the Modern Bathroom

In 1829, architect Isaiah Rogers introduced a game-changing technology at the Tremont House in Boston, the first hotel with indoor plumbing. It had eight water closets on the ground floor, fed by a water storage tank on the top floor so gravity could flush the toilets into a sewer system.

A few years later, Rogers joined forces with John Jacob Astor to build the Astor House in New York. The hotel had 309 rooms, with bathing and toilet rooms on every floor and water pumped up by steam engines to huge tanks on the roof. Gas furnaces with attached tanks heated the water for the bathtubs, which drained into the sewer system.

By the mid-1800s, the link between hygiene and health was understood, and advanced cities soon began building proper sewer systems. Many ancient cultures had primitive plumbing, but much of that knowledge had been forgotten. Early wooden pipe systems weren't sufficient, and in the late 1850s engineer Julius W. Adams designed one of the first modern city sewer systems, for Brooklyn. He went on to publish his techniques, laying out a blueprint for cities around the world.

Once pressurized water could carry waste out of homes and businesses, manufacturers around the world learned to produce toilets properly, and the modern bathroom as we know it was born.

Ready to write the next chapter for your own bathroom? Explore our bathroom vanities.