Why America’s A-list want twice as many bathrooms as bedrooms

When Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck bought their 38,000 sq ft house in Beverly Hills for $61 million earlier this year, it had everything you might expect – a 12-car garage, a pool, a home cinema – and some things you might not (a pickleball court). Also, twice as many bathrooms (24) as bedrooms (12), which seems now to be the aspirational ratio. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are lagging behind a bit in their Montecito mansion, with a paltry 16 baths and nine beds. Though it does have a chicken coop, rose garden and tea house, essentially the full Marie Antoinette. 

If glitzy US property shows such as Selling Sunset and Buying Beverly Hills are to be believed, double the number of bathrooms to bedrooms has become standard in many high-end American houses. Which leads me to ask, with my simple, frugal English heart, what are they all doing in there? 

There are multiple threads on the Q&A website Quora examining this issue, the initial questions invariably asked by perplexed Europeans, many of whom still consider an en suite bathroom to be the height of luxury. 

One answer, given by Anne Whitacre, who describes herself as an architectural specifier for large projects, says, “If you entertain a lot, having a couple of half baths around for guests is a nice idea. Your family will never use them, you can put out your ‘best’ towels, and I’ve known some women to ‘exercise their creativity’ with the wall color (sic), they get super fancy faucets and really quiet toilets. I knew one person who bought a small Picasso drawing – which he hated – and it was in the main floor bathroom. That had two benefits: he could show off to his friends that he had a Picasso and he didn’t have to look at it.”

I belong to a few house-decorating Facebook groups and as is usual with these things, they’re dominated by American women, many of whom see decorating a “guest bath” as a sort of exercise on a small scale that might inform larger projects; a plumbed-in design sketch book. 

What is clear is that far from being merely functional areas, bathrooms have become private retreats from a busy world. Where once a scented candle and some decent towels would do it, now the luxe bathroom list includes steam showers, Japanese loos that play music, and chromotherapy tubs (me neither; something to do with light therapy, apparently). 

But you can take it too far. One friend who always puts out pretty guest soaps for visitors complains that no one ever uses them, as they’re “just too good”.

One of the reasons for this splashy, flashy extravagance is space. The average single family home in the US is, at 2,000 sq ft, twice the size of a comparable home in Europe. And the size of American homes has doubled in the past 20 years – even though families have be

come smaller – with the number of homes with 10 or more bathrooms doubling in the last decade.

Whereas an en suite bathroom for the main bedroom was previously standard, now there is a requirement for his-and-her bathrooms (or his and his, etc), which frankly sounds life- and marriage-enhancing to me. This necessitates at least one more bathroom for children and visitors. Ideally, you also want a bathroom on the ground floor, and on any additional floor. And obviously you need one in the pool house, by the home cinema, wine room, tea house and pickleball court. It soon adds up. 

My friend Julia, a Tennessee native who has just moved back to the US after 30 years in London, is struck by the change. “It seems that you have to have at least one bathroom per bedroom, preferably more. Of course, it’s a competition: it’s up there with home cinemas, gyms and cigar rooms in the showing-off stakes.”

Also, the suburbs are another country. Whereas in some American cities, homes still retain more modest bathroom numbers, when you move outside these areas, where space is less of a premium, you see the home-as-spa aesthetic flourishing. 

In the UK, property experts say adding a second bathroom to a house that only has one can put 5 per cent on the value of the property. But in these more frugal times, some of us might be wary about the extra maintenance and running costs. When you give each child their own bathroom, can the one-hour shower be far behind? Is it just too extravagant for this more modest era? It reminds me of my father who, on being told by a boastful friend he now had two yachts, deadpanned, “Do you sail them both at the same time?”

Is there such a thing as too many bathrooms? Personally, I see extra bathrooms, far from being a luxury, as just further locations in which I have to pick up damp towels and remove empty cardboard loo rolls from their holders before replacing them with fresh ones. Where some see added luxury, others see extra housekeeping. 

But, yes, for ease a good ratio would be an en suite bathroom for the main bedroom, a family bathroom for the children – possibly more than one if you have a Waltons-esque clan – and a guest bathroom on whichever floor you use for entertaining. This is enough for comfort and privacy without indulging in that most modern and ubiquitous of crimes: showing off.