Hotel bathrooms have to pack a lot of odd technology and odd experiences into a really small space. There’s a huge potential for chaos and clutter here, not to mention the problem of foul odors, hard surfaces near exposed skin, air and water temperature regulation, lighting that’s either too glaring or too dim, noises that travel where they’re not supposed to, impeding the spread of diseases, etc. It’s always an impressive feat when a bathroom can address all of these parameters and still end up feeling gracious or uncluttered or comfortable or tied in some way to the overall atmosphere of a place.

Sometimes this gracefulness is accomplished through sheer ingenuity or a meticulous sense of composition. The exact placement of a tissue box or the careful filtering of natural light becomes extremely important here.

Sometimes it’s accomplished by just going for broke and starting off with a far larger room to work with than you would normally think necessary. Though being liberal with square footage has its own set of problems to contend with. When you have the luxury of extra space to work with then design laziness can easily happen. This is when you get a space with absurd amounts of elbow room but no sense of scale, or mystery, or grace.

Or, if you’re lucky and if the bathroom’s designer kept up a spirit of ingenuity and meticulousness even with a generous amount of square footage to work with, you could end up with something transcendently wonderful that just might be one of the best places in the whole hotel.