THE ROMANCE OF A POWDER ROOM

THE RIENZI MUSEUM // HOUSTON, TEXAS

I love a beautiful bathroom. I never leave a fancy restaurant or an old home without paying a visit to one, to appraise the character of the wallpaper or the quality of the soap fragrance. I’ve even had thoughts of authoring a coffee table anthology titled "The Romance of a Powder Room." Perhaps this love stems from my inner socially anxious, who imagines the perfect bathroom as a tiled sanctuary where velvet-draped ladies can reapply their rouge and judge the conversational merits of tiresome dinner companions.⁣
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I fancy myself a bit of a tourist in this respect, as well. In Paris, I once spent over an hour searching for a circa-1905 underground washroom located beside the Madeleine Church, rumored to be an art deco masterpiece of stained glass and wood-carved stalls. I never found it, later discovering it had been recently closed. Later in London, I even had a celebrity sighting of Stanley Tucci gasping wide-eyed at the futuristic egg-shaped pods in the bathroom at the Sketch tea room (the Sketch bathroom is the Stanley Tucci of bathrooms, so this was all too apt an occurrence).⁣
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All this considered, imagine my delight upon entering the ladies’ toilettes at the Rienzi House Museum in Houston, adorned with shell-shaped pink marble and gold Sherle Wagner faucet fixtures (fashioned in the original dolphin motif first offered by the designer in 1945, pictured above). A pink powder room dream, to satisfy the most frivolous of fancies.

1.10.2020