I checked into a hotel room last year, dropped my bag, and turned around to find my bathroom staring back at me. It had a glass wall, floor to ceiling, facing directly at the bed, without any frosting on the glass, no curtain, and nothing standing between whoever was showering and whoever was lying there scrolling their phone. My immediate instinct was to stand very still and try to figure out who, exactly, this room thought I was travelling with.
This is a standard fixture in hotels across the country, and with alarming confidence. Five-star properties, boutique hideaways, business hotels that otherwise seem entirely sensible, are all installing bathrooms with the modesty of a fishbowl and calling it design. Some come with a blind or a curtain, giving guests the option to close the glass off when they'd rather not perform their evening routine for an audience. Plenty of others skip that option entirely. Ask a hotel why, and you get the same three words every time: openness, space, light. Ask a guest, and you get considerably more range, most of it somewhere between "I love it" and "absolutely not."
I wanted to know what the people actually designing these rooms think, so I asked Gayatri N. Railkar, Design Manager at IMK Architects, who has led the firm's hospitality vertical for five years and has worked on a host of Taj properties where this debate plays out room by room. Her answer was the most sensible thing anyone has said to me about this. “Glass is a design option that needs to be used thoughtfully, and works when it is appropriate to the room and the guest experience,” she says. The real luxury, she adds, "is not simply in using glass, but in how it is detailed and combined with privacy, comfort and the overall design of the room."
The space argument is genuine, and Railkar was clear that glass makes a compact bathroom feel larger and brings daylight into a room that would otherwise depend entirely on artificial light. It's a real fix for a real problem, which is that hotel bathrooms are often small, often windowless, and glass is a legitimate way to open that up. What it isn't, she also pointed out, is the only way. "Good planning, larger openings, mirrors, lighting and other translucent materials can achieve a similar effect without a full glass wall,” she says. So the space case explains why architects reach for glass in the first place, but it doesn't fully explain why so many hotels reach for the most exposed version of it, when more modest options exist and do the same job.
Which raises the real question. If space and light are the goal, why does the guest so rarely get a say in how exposed that solution leaves them? Railkar's answer was simple, and proposed a middle ground. Glass doesn't have to mean full transparency, because it comes in versions that are fluted, tinted or switchable, capable of turning opaque at the flip of a control, and can be paired with curtains that let the guest decide, on a given night, how much they want the bathroom to open up. "They should be able to enjoy openness when they want it, and privacy when they need it”, she said.
Plenty of hotels have taken the space-and-light logic and stopped halfway, by installing the glass, and skipping the mechanism that would let a guest turn it off. What you get instead is a bathroom that solves the architect's problem and creates a new one for the guest. You're now showering in full view of whoever you're sharing the room with, whether that's your partner, your colleague or your mother, with no way to change that for the length of your stay. The fix isn't too complicated, and the architect building these rooms has already spelled it out. It's just a fix hotels haven't fully caught up to yet.