Here's a toilet with a twist

When I was a wee lad, my family had a cottage in rural Ontario where we would go every summer for vacation. It was rural on a scale that makes my head spin now, but at the time it was a great adventure. We had no electricity, no running water and we had what I now know to be a pit toilet in the bathroom. It was an awful, foul-smelling affair; essentially an indoor outhouse. A pit toilet is a toilet with a large hole in the bottom of it. The toilet sits over a cistern and whatever goes into it lands with a splash after a short delay. But when you're that far from civilization and you have no access to running water, hygienic options are limited. Unpleasant to remember as an adult and the horror to end all horrors when you're nine. Anyhow, I like to keep an eye on the horizon with regard to home building trends and sustainability is very much one of my buzzwords. What does this have to do with a pit toilet in an otherwise charming cottage in the middle of nowhere? Pay attention. I was watching a TV show on sustainable building recently and the show's host dropped in on the Bronx Zoo to check out a new public restroom they built. The Eco Restroom at the Bronx Zoo accommodates a half million people a year and uses 3 oz. of water for each time one of those visitors flushes a toilet. The host was saying that the eco-restroom saves a million gallons of water a year using a composting system instead of the typical low-flush toilets required by building codes. I heard composting toilet and flashed back immediately to the pit toilet of my childhood. But I kept watching, despite my negative associations. It turns out that a composting toilet is nothing like a pit toilet. It is an odorless, closed system that turns human waste into fertilizer. Most of them use no water at all, but the system the Bronx Zoo uses a tiny bit of water to generate foam from biodegradable soap. This foam allows a foam-flush composting toilet to look and behave like a conventional toilet. The image above and to the right is how one looks, and below is a diagram that shows how it works. Our society expends tremendous resources securing a safe, clean water supply for everyone. Then as individuals, we turn around and flush 40% of that clean, safe water down the toilet. If that weren't wasteful enough, the resulting effluent needs to be treated at more great expense only to be dumped into nearest body of water after the solids have been removed. Yet no one seems to know why red tide blooms are so bad in my beloved Gulf of Mexico. This system, like so many other ones, is unsustainable. It's unsustainable economically as well as environmentally. But there's a solution out there and utilising that solution will require that folks get over some of their squeamishness on the topic. The system at the Bronx Zoo was installed by a company called Clivus Multrum  in Massachusetts. Clivus Multrum refined and brought to market the idea of a modern, composting toilet more than 30 years ago. Clivus also invented the foam-flush toilet. How their system works is pretty simple and straightforward. Human waste is kept in an enclosed chamber and time, biology and gravity work together to turn that waste into fertilizer. There's no stink, no mess, no polluted groundwater, no expenses related to what to do with it. Not to get all granola or anything, but what it does too is return to the soil the nutrients you didn't need. There is a whole subculture out there dedicated to composting toilets I'm learning, and a clearinghouse for information on the subject is a website called Composting Toilet World. That sounds like the name of a particularly spooky campground or something, but they have some really great information and resources. Now I love the idea of a dual-flush toilet, but the idea of a composting toilet takes the idea embodied in a dual-flush and takes it to an extreme the purist in me loves. All Hail Clivus Multrum!

Can a toilet be Modern?

I have been granted a tremendous opportunity to design a Modern bathroom. I mean a really Modern one filled with all of the glory and wonder that minimalism can bring to a space.

I've done Modern-ish ones before, in the style we call "Transitional Contemporary" in the trade. Transitional Contemporary is not Modernism, although it gets mistaken for it with alarming regularity. Transitional Contemporary can be attractive and fun, and because it's such a loosely-defined term, it's really flexible. As a designer, I have a lot more leeway in Transitional Contemporary because I don't have to be such a stickler for form.

Most times, when I'm putting together a plan for a bathroom, I put the toilet in a separate water closet inside of the main bath. I do that nearly by reflex because that's what everybody does when you have the room for it. Just put the thing behind a door and then you don't have to think about it any more.

I've never really thought about why everybody does it that way, but my current Modern Bathroom may have given me the explanation.

The American toilet looks like this and has since the dawn of indoor plumbing. Sure, there are some variations on this theme, but the typical toilet available in the US today looks just like the one that was in the house where your grandmother grew up. That this is what a toilet looks like now and always has is at the root of why people like me shutter them away in water closets out of reflex. I mean, who wants to look at that?

When I go through my catalogs of modern pluming fixtures, I see beautifully minimalist sinks and shower pans and faucets but invariably, there is no toilet in the collection. I suppose that since everyone keeps them out of sight, there's no need. Well, my current project is one of the exceptions to the have-enough-room-for-a-water-closet kind of master baths. I don't have enough room to hide anything but the plumbing, and this baby's going to be a wide open space. Finding a Modern toilet that will look great with the modern sink, tub, shower and faucets I'm already looking at will be tough. Or at least I thought until I came upon my new friends at Blu Bathworks (http://www.blubathworks.com/) this morning.

Blu Bathworks is a Canadian company that does virtually nothing but make and sell Modern plumbing fixtures. As an added bonus, all of their products strive to maximize the efficiency of their water use and utilize technologies like the dual-flush toilet I've written about previously. In keeping with the Modernist propensity to shrink the profiles of ordinary objects, a lot of their toilets appear to be tankless such at the Metrix to the right. The toilet still has a water tank, it's just hidden in the wall behind the toilet. That hide-the-tank-in-the-wall mechanism is called an in-wall carrier system and is itself a pretty slick piece of engineering. But not content with toilets, Blu has a line of coordinating bidets. Bidets make some people giggle and feel uncomfortable. There a lot of chatter about them being unecessarily indulgent. Let me state for the record that the people generating that chatter have never spent a whole lot of time with a bidet. Spend a week with easy access to one and you will never think of them as foolish again. Man! Talk about hygeine!

Let's talk about sinks ba-by

Somebody asked me about "farm sinks" today and I launched into one of my odes of joy on the subject. But first, let's clarify the language we're using. The correct term for them is "apron-front" not "farm." A lot of times, you can see these sinks in some pretty countrified kitchens and I'll admit that some of them do lend themselves to that particular "style," if I can use that word.

However, using the term "farm" to describe them does do a disservice and it paints them into an unnecessary corner. They are not so much countrified as they are traditional. To the right is a Shaw's Original, which started the whole thing in 1897. The Shaw's is still made by Rohl (http://www.rohlhome.com/) and one of the things that makes a Shaw's a Shaw's is that it's made from fire clay. Fire clay is a very specific kind of high temperature ceramic. It is the same thing that blast furnaces are lined with. When it's used as a kitchen sink, it is a material that's impervious to both insult and injury. Unlike a lot of materials, you can scrub fire clay to your heart's content and you will not scratch it. It doesn't stain in the first place, so if you do end up with a can of Ajax in your hand you might want to take a look at that. Anyhow, the Shaw's is a classic and as such it works well with virtually any aesthetic, from traditional to modern.

Once you leave the Shaw's behind though, there are a nearly uncountable number of options out there and I'm seeing a lot more of these things being made from metal. Here's a more traditional metal sink by Native Trails (http://www.nativetrails.net/). This sink is actually hand made from hammered copper with a layer of nickel over top of it. Copper is a highly reactive metal and it takes a long time for it to achieve something approaching a uniform patina. It'll be gorgeous when it gets there, but it will be anything but along the way.

The beauty to the left is a 12-gauge stainless steel sink from Bates and Bates (http://www.batesandbates.com/). The lower the gauge number the thicker the metal. A $200 sink from a home center will be 20-gauge and that's a hair thicker than aluminum foil. At 12-gauge, this baby will lack the tell-tale sound that people associate with dropping something into a metal sink. No gong here. That it's pieced and welded together instead of being stamped (the flat bottom is a dead give away) along with the superior grade of the metal are why this is a $3500 kitchen sink. You can pick yourself up now. Strange as it may sound, the world is full of people who will spend that kind of jack on a sink.

Kohler (http://www.kohler.com/) came out with their stainless steel apron-front a couple of years ago and I think I've used the Kohler Verity more than any other apron-front sink in my kitchen work. While still by no means an inexpensive sink, the Verity is more like The People's version of the Bates and Bates. Still gorgeous, though the metal isn't as low a gauge. It can be found for anywhere from $800 to $1000.

Due in a large part to their traditional roots, most apron-fronts are single bowl sinks. Since running a dishwasher is a less-wasteful use of electricity and water than hand washing dishes(counter intuitive I know but true true true), having a single bowl looks better and is all most people need. However, there are double bowls out there and our friends at Blanco (http://www.blanco.de/) have a really nice one. Blanco is a German brand that exceeds the stereotype of German efficiency and innovation. Good Lord I love a right angle and that sink over there has enough to keep me happy for the rest of my life.

So I think I'd be willing to say that although the apron-front sink is not new, it is very NOW.

Oh vanity of vanities; my bathroom

This is the Memoirs Suite by my friends at Kohler(http://www.kohler.com/). For the last couple of years I've been specifying plumbing fixtures for the higher end of the market but I'm working on something right now that's on a more resonable budget. It's interesting to recommend things that I could afford instead of things that I admire but probably would not buy for me. Probably wouldn't? Who am I kidding?

Anyhow, I've been reviewing some of the new stuff that Kohler's been putting out and they have really turned that brand into something great from an aesthetic point of view. I'm a pretty die hard modernist when it comes to things that I like, but I rarely get the opportunity to advise people in ways that appeal to me as well. One of the things that makes me a designer is that I can set aside what I like and instead show people what they like. That said, the bath fixtures for the project I have in mind are going to be Kohler all the way.

Even though the fixtures in the suite above are pretty traditional, they are clean and classic and I'd nearly forgotten how much I like the entire Memoirs collection. What's great about selecting fixtures from a collection by Kohler is that you can buy an entire suite. That is; the toilet, lavatory, faucets, etc. will all share the same design. Although they aren't giving anything away, Kohler represents a good marriage of beauty, quality and price. They have a lot of value, even if they aren't going to be the cheapest thing out there. When it comes to plumbing fixtures though, you do not want the lowest-price stuff. Trust me on that. The $100 toilet on an end cap at Home Depot is a heartache in a box. Don't do it! Sometimes, it costs too much to save a couple of bucks.

Kohler's also introduced the Persuade toilet. Even though it's not part of a suite, it is a dual-flush toilet that retails for under $400. All hail Kohler for that. From what I can tell, it's their only dual-flush model. It is the tip of an iceberg though. Dual-flush toilets will be standard issue within the next ten years, mark my word.

Kohler has been buying up a bunch of high-end brands in recent years and they've been using the higher-end stuff they own to bring up their flagship brand. Kallista (http://www.kallista.com/), Barbara Barry (http://www.barbarabarry.com/), Walker-Zanger (http://www.walkerzanger.com/), Ann Sacks(http://www.annsacks.com/) and Baker (http://www.kohlerinteriors.com/) to name a few are all held under the Kohler flag and it shows. Ann Sacks tile is a eye-poppingly beautiful as ever yet a lot of Kohler's sinks show a definite Sacks-ian influence. I was surprised to see this toilet seat on Kohler's website, things this well-made were once the sole province of luxury brands, but not any more.

You can spend more money that what you'll find through Kohler, but I doubt you find more value in consumer-grade plumbing fixtures.

Contain yourself

The image to the left is an interior shot of a home designed by a visionary architect named Jennifer Siegel. The home Ms. Siegel designed here first came to my attention in Dwell magazine and I was reminded of her ideas when I was thinking about sustainability this morning. Sustainability is the new buzzword of the design and architect worlds, and it's a steaming locomotive on its way to you.

I've written for the last couple of days about wasteful practices and their unsustainability over the long term. I think the current housing market mess and mortgage industry debacle are a another symptom of this unsustainability. Housing prices have increased dramatically in the last 20 years. Increased to the point where typical wage earners can no longer afford to buy a home in a desireable part of the country. The market reaction to that unaffordability was to get creative on the financing end of it and the results are splashed across the headlines every morning. Everyone seems hell-bent on fixing the problem by bailing people out of bad mortgages on homes they can't afford. The blame seems to have settled exclusively on the mortgage industry. Oh, there's plenty of blame there, but it's not the whole story. Building costs have soared and it's not due to greed on the part of the building industry either. Concrete really does cost a lot more now than it used to. Ditto lumber and finishes and labor and all the rest. What people consider to be an adequate and appropriate home has reached the point of unsustainability, just like their water use has. It's time, high time, to look at what constitutes a house.

At current rates of population growth, the US will need an additional 427 billion square feet of space by the year 2030. That's a lot of room for a lot of people, most of whom cannot afford to spend $300,000 on a stucco split level on a cul de sac. So what's there to do?

The house above is made from discarded shipping containers. The unintended consequence of our trade imbalance with China is that every day, ships laden with goods arrive in US ports and get unloaded. Because we buy so much more than we sell to them, for most of those containers, it's a one-way trip. So they pile up in New York and LA and Miami and Tampa and San Francisco and New Orleans and they sit there.

A growing group of visionaries is looking to them to solve two sustainability problems at once. How do you build interesting, affordable housing that will allow builders to make enough money that they will build it and what the hell are we going to do with that mountain of shipping containers along the expressway. The answer is build houses. Interesting, beautiful, sustainable houses that people can afford. There is an entire web subculture out there on the topic and two places where I've been reading up on this are a blog called Treehugger (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/shipping_contai.php) and an architectural clearinghouse called Fabprefab (http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm).

It is not 1945 anymore and it's time to stop looking at housing and commercial construction as if it were.