What does your downstairs loo say about you? Eva Wiseman investigates…
The downstairs bathroom is often a dour and sordid little place. It’s usually hidden, beneath the stairs or out the back of the kitchen like a flushing shed, its size and camouflage suggesting shame – nobody dares acknowledge the terrible things that go on inside it.
While the upstairs bathroom might be glamorous and expansive, with its special unguents and wide windows, your guests rarely get to see it – instead, they wash their hands and evacuate their bowels in this almost-cupboard. And yet, we try to cheer up this space.
We try! God love us, we try. Recently, I replaced the leaking old toilet and awkward sink in our downstairs loo with a vintage suite in sage green, painted the walls a gloss navy, and bought an old Habitat ‘Crayonne’ mirror on eBay (the olive-coloured one in curved plastic). I also replaced the floor tiles with cork, and then sat back to wait for our lives to change. I expect the shift to happen any day now.
Previously, I had made a stand against mirrors down here, for some reason to do with body image, or vanity, or not finding one I liked for under £50, and where the mirror would have hung I stuck a reproduction of one of my most loved paintings, Leftovers by the Swedish artist Mamma Andersson. I’d recommend it – I washed my hands there twice or so a day, and learned every inch of this painting as if a poem, the woman walking from bed to shower, acting out all the various permutations of living. Now, seeing my own face floating there in the mirror before me, I feel vaguely cheated.
My favourite celebrity interview trope is when a journalist sneaks into the star’s downstairs loo to steal some toilet paper (if they’re visiting a royal) or, more commonly, to get an unfiltered idea of what they’re really like, behind the glamour. This is the one place where their mask, surely, slips.
Except, these rooms, even acknowledging the squalidity implicit in their use, are inevitably staged to within an inch of their lives.
Here you will typically find one of their spare Oscars, or Baftas, or a similar gold-plated trophy, as if to say, ‘this old thing’; as if to say, ‘I care so little for awards that I keep them with the piss.’ For a while it was customary for celebrities to have a little bottle of Aesop’s ‘post-poo drops’ on the shelf too; the suggestion being they could laugh at themselves, and also that they were human, just like us. The effect was somewhat disturbed, though, by the fact these carefully curated jokes would no doubt be placed just beneath one of their framed magazine covers, or a photo of them laughing with David Bowie or Mandela or the Pope.
In Joan Collins’ toilet, I recall fondly from one of her interviews, there was a huge bouquet, a photo of her with Jackie in the back of a limousine, and a bottle of Tom Ford’s perfume ‘Fucking Fabulous’. The scene was set.
