" Until the Berlin Wall came down the veteran traveller visiting Eastern Europe always included a squash ball in his suitcase. In most hotel showers were few and far between, although usually compensated for by ancient bathtubs of sensational dimensions. The snag was an inevitable lack of bath plugs, hence the squash ball. At the other extreme, one bathroom I encountered in a melancholy hotel in Ljubljana was so small that the bidet was installed in the diminutive shower stall. However, the best bathroom innovation must be the contraption described by Ralph Caplan in his book By Design: ' An ingenious example of the product-situation cycle could be found in Quebec waterfront hotel called L'Hotel Louis XIV, lamentably destroyed by fire years ago. At the Louis XIV, the term "private bath" meant what it means in many European hotels: the bath is yours but not yours alone, for it is also the private bath of the guest on the other side of the bathroom. This creates a problem. If the bathroom has no inside locks, you have no privacy. But if the doors can be locked from the inside, one forgetful guest can lock the other out indefinitely and almost surely will. Well, there were no locks inside the bathrooms of the Louis XIV, but tied to each doorknob you simply linked the two hooks together, holding both doors shut. There was no way to get back into your own room without at the same time unlocking the door for the other guests'. 'It was memorable', the autor records, 'as the total integration of object and circunstance'."
Alan Fletcher
Ilustration. Milton Glaser
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