Look, I’m a bath person. I manage one, two or sometimes even three a day. (Let’s not get sidetracked with a discussion about water.) I love a hot bath before clambering out and lying, steaming like a lobster, on my bed. But when I climb out, I want something warm underfoot, something soft and cosy. And I don’t mean the dog.
Carpet, that’s what. Or a rug, in my case. I have a vast kilim rug that covers almost all my bathroom floor, so that I can potter about barefoot and not risk cold toes or slipping over.
Carpeting or covering the bathroom floor with a rug is controversial. It was big in the 1970s and 80s, along with bidets and shag-pile loo mats, but the idea now causes revulsion. ‘You can’t do that!’ a friend squawked when I moved into my current home and declared that I was considering sticking carpet in my bathroom. ‘It’ll stink!’
The pervasive belief remains that carpeting a bathroom means said carpet will smell of wee, which leads me to a personal question: how exactly are you doing it? I live alone, my bathroom is mine and mine only. I don’t have a husband, small children or teenage boys, slapdash with their aim. I back myself to manage a quick, tidy trip to the loo – even in the dark at 3am. So, why not put something soft down?
I settled for a rug in the end because I liked the floorboards in my bathroom and wanted a more contemporary look than wall-to-wall carpet. The floorboards were sanded and whitewashed, and I slapped the rug on top.
I also wallpapered my bathroom with a pattern I’d lusted after for years (Molly Mahon’s Birds & Bees in pink), shunted a huge, marble-topped chest of drawers into one corner for linens and towels, an armchair into another, added two lamps (having forced the reluctant builder to put sockets in there) and hung up several paintings. I wanted my bathroom to feel like an extension of my bedroom: warm and cosy, instead of sterile and clinical. Who wants to hang around in a bathroom that feels like an operating theatre?
No prizes for guessing Jayne Mansfield’s preference
Who wants to hang around in a bathroom that feels like an operating theatre? asks Sophia Money-Coutts
I’m not the only one. Online searches for ‘bathroom carpet’ rocketed by 360 per cent at the end of last year as we, apparently, are growing nostalgic for the past. Interiors queens Lucy Williams and India Knight have both recently talked in favour of the trend.
‘I’m going to take the bathroom carpet up for reasons of mild squeamishness about ancient pee drops,’ India wrote of the bathroom in her new house, which I quite understand. You don’t necessarily want to inherit someone else’s manky old bathroom carpet. ‘Until that happens, though, I do love the feeling of toes on wool straight out of the bath. Surely bathroom carpet is due a revival, like coloured suites?’
Well, quite. Energy is expensive these days, and carpet or a rug in a bathroom can boost the warmth factor no end. ‘We love rugs, and especially timber floors with rugs,’ says interior designer Melissa Hutley, of Hutley & Humm. ‘It feels very smart, and warmer than tiles, and we’re big fans of bathrooms feeling more like rooms, with furniture and curtains.’
We’re not necessarily talking kiddie bathrooms here (although there is a terrific Mumsnet thread on this topic, with one poster claiming her hot-pink bathroom carpet was very useful for putting her babies down on the floor when they needed nappy changes; others were left aghast by this idea).
A rug in a grown-up bathroom is a luxury, Hutley says, ‘because it shows that it’s a space used by people who look after it, rather than a space that needs to be Dettoled from top to bottom every day. But rugs are great, they give a bathroom character and heritage.’
Of course, you may want to put down a posh Persian rug. Very grand. But I settled on a washable one from Weaver Green. It just about fits in the washing machine, and I cram it in when it needs a good clean after weeks of bare feet, spilled make-up and dog paws padding about on it.
No pee drops on my rug, though, because some of us have perfectly good aim.
‘A damp carpet is a vector of all things transmissible’
By Mary Killen
Carpets in bathrooms became confused with luxury when they began to appear in hotel bathrooms, but they should never have been popularised in either hotel or home. You might as well have a Persian rug in your kitchen. In both rooms there is too much scope for mess: food spills in the kitchen, ‘bio’ spills in the bathroom.
It’s not just that men tend not to ‘aim to please’, as the old loo signs used to exhort them to. Sometimes they get to an age where they can’t aim to please. Then there are vomiting teenagers to take into consideration.
The moist atmosphere of a bathroom promotes mould and mildew so the inevitably damp carpet becomes a lethal vector of all things transmissible: athlete’s foot, ringworm, plantar warts. And it never occurs to most of us that Staph infections can lurk on carpets and enter through minor cuts or cracks in the skin of your feet.
The truth is your carpeted floor can never be properly cleaned, nor properly dried out. In my mind I can see too many images of the carpeted cheap pub and hotel bathrooms where we often stay when going to weddings. The ‘vibe’ from these carpets, some of which have been there for decades, simply bleats: ‘I am full of different types of DNA, which no professional carpet cleaner has been able to remove.’
The moist atmosphere of a bathroom promotes mould and mildew so the inevitably damp carpet becomes a lethal vector of all things transmissible, writes Marry Killen
I am perhaps a little chippy because I do have a friend with a fabulous, very large, carpeted bathroom. A ball-footed bath sits in the middle of the room on its own raised, non-carpeted platform. There are acres of white bathmats and giant bath towels simmering away on heated towel rails. A large sash window is easy to open to air the room. There are two comfortable upholstered armchairs in there as well.
Taste arbiter Nicky Haslam tells me he adores carpeted bathrooms. (Incidentally, he had an Astroturf carpet in his study while at Eton.) And a younger friend loves the spacious carpeted bathroom of his 92-year-old grandfather. ‘It is almost like having another sitting room. It is luxurious to slope out of a long bath on to a carpeted floor. But I do avoid prolonged meditations on the carpet itself, where splutters of mould, or worse, are easily spied.’
Some people think a cool marble floor projects the right message of extreme hygiene in a bathroom but then the bathroom experience is less enjoyable because, with a cold marble floor, you are less inclined to linger.
An English bathroom is, of course, quite a different matter to a Greek or Jamaican bathroom. And it is much more pleasant to step on a tiled or marble floor in a hot country. However it is not worth the risk of indulging one’s feebleness by installing a carpet in an English bathroom. Our bathrooms demand a mopping, and for that reason it has to be wooden or tiled. My own bathroom has non-splintery elm floorboards and White Company bathmats. My friend Sophie has a good solution. Underfloor heating and nonslip Marmoleum lino.
Another friend who installed expensive curtains in her guest bathroom had to think again when her elderly father came to stay. The lavatory was right next to the window. Luckily the old colonel did not mind the fact that, for the duration of his visit, the bottom half of the curtains were swathed in protective black bin bags.
