AMERICAS BATHROOMS ARE GOING UPSCALE
Di Nancy Mc Keon (The Washington Post)


The Pottery Barn catalog is selling toilets. Restoration Hardware leads off its winter catalog with a $3,600 cast iron tub. And the ethereally elegant Waterworks bath store in Georgetown plans to triple its current size this spring.
Those are just the tip of the bath-retail iceberg. Expo Design Center is the fancy- schmancy kitchen-and-bath offspring of home-improvement behemoth Home Depot. Sears, Roebuck & Co. is on the trail as well: It will roll out 11 of its new Great Indoors super-showrooms-bath, kitchen and furnishings targeting a slightly less affluent customer than Expo - around the country this year. And the Washington mecca for high-end bath fixtures and fittings, Union Hardware’s Decorator Center, says its bath business has skyrocketed over the past four years, showing a double-digit increase in sales each of those years.
What’s going on? Not since Watergate has there been so much ado about plumbers. Is there room for all this activity in the smallest room in the house? Downturn or no downturn, retailers seem to be counting on it, based on projections and the seemingly insatiable American appetite for improvement of both self and home, which in this material culture are often fused.
This week, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies announced that remodelling expenditures by U.S.homeowners in 2000 amounted to $101.9 billion. That’s up only 2.7 percent from the previous year, evidence of the slowdown we’ve been hearing about. But it’s on top of growth of almost 21.5 percent since the end of 1995, says Kermit Baker, director of the center’s Remodeling Futures Program, which produces the numbers. Based on the detailed information available for the year before, probably 15 percent of that money was for bathroom projects.
Case Design/Remodeling Inc. of Bethesda, Md., created a bath division in 1997 to handle the uptick in bath traffic it was seeing. "I sort of equate it with fancy cars, "says Bruce Case, vice president and head of the bath division. "Over the past two years, we’ve seen people wanting to spend more. With two people working more hours, they just want to pamper themselves."
To make things happen fast for its customers, Case developed a "pull and replace" bath program, complete with on-site bath trailers packed with the materials for each project. Cost of a simple pull-and-replace on a standard 5-by-9-foot bath: from $7,000 to $25,000, depending on finish materials. Bigger, more-elaborate jobs are handled by Case’s design-build group, but the bottom line for the bath division last year was 20 remodels per month, a big increase over 1999’s tally.
It’s no mystery where all the remodelling money is coming from: Many homeowners who aren’t rich have houses that are. Tapping their equity has caused Dumpsters to sprout like dandelions at urban and suburban curbsides while homeowners bump up, add on and generally "rethink" their intimate surroundings.
Everyone knows it costs a bundle to redo a kitchen, even when we turn a blind eye to those seductive high-end, high-style appliances at $4,000 and $5,000 a pop. But in recent years, the plain-Jane bathroom has been enhanced with doodads of its own.
Bathtub? Please. Trophy homes are not the only ones that now instead feature a $3,500 whirlpool bath, or maybe a soaking tub. Shower? Make that a hand-held shower head with pressure-balanced thermostatic controls plus body sprays installed in newly replumbed walls. Plop a hand-thrown ceramic "vessel" on top of the solid cherry vanity (instead of a sink, of course! Where have you been?) and now you’re cleaning up.
As one might expect, Jack Suvak, director of research for faucetmaker Moen Inc., watches faucet sales pretty closely. And he says the number of homeowners installing four or more new faucets in a bathroom project has increased by a third since 1995.
And those faucets - by which Suvak also means shower heads and body sprays - cost their weight in chrome-plated solid cast brass. Add up the components for a relatively modest Gnutti Sebastiano shower system purchased recently at Expo Design - thermostatic valve, $299.25; volume control, $84; two body sprays at $45 each; hand-shower and wall-mounted bar, $186; and wall supply outlet, $21.75. With tax, you’ve reached $800 before you’ve even found a plumber to install it.
"People who come into the (bath) market after five, six, seven years can be surprised at all the styles available now - and at the prices," says Suvak. "But they’re more willing to spend, to get more enjoyment out of the bath."
It’s impossible to research this evolving bath culture without reading that to the overworked, multitasking American the bathroom has become a haven, an oasis, a private retreat. Pooh! It’s just one more area whose manufacturers have adopted the rhythms of fashion (yearly introductions of shapes and colors) and technology (the annual upgrades). In short, the bath has become one more American shopping opportunity.
And never mind the great American sport of keeping up with the Joneses: Part of all the upgrading going on is people trying to keep up with the Gateses - or at least with glossy shelter magazines.
Another motivation is fear of losing that all-important resale value. No matter that you take showers, not baths; what if, when you go to sell your house a few years from now, the lack of an air-jet tub tips your buyers toward a competing property? Recriminations of the plumbing variety are sure to ensue.
The Kohler Co. put bathrooms in the fashion business back in 1965, when the "Bold Look of Kohler" slogan was born. And its lush colors and lavish print ads have captured annual sales of $2.3 billion for the privately held firm and 8 percent of the fitting market, according to the Freedonia Group Inc., a Cleveland.based industrial market research firm.
But it was Home Depot that turned the bathroom into an exercise in black-belt shopping. First, through sheer muscle and influence on manufacturers, it offered consumers sinks and toilets and the like that were once available only through plumbing contractors.
Then, in 1991, the company "has an inkling" it could develop the niche market for the high-end decorator-level stuff and spent a few years tweaking the formula, says Melissa Watkins, public-relations manager for what became Expo Design Center. Some upscale vendors .- manufacturers of $800 faucets and $1,500 dishwashers - had to be convinced. "They would fly them to the Miami store," says Watkins, to show them the concept as it emerged between 1995 and 1997.
That concept flew, and Expo estimates it had sales of $600 million in the 15 stores that were open in 1999. And this big box thinks big: It currently has 26 stores, and it expects to have 200 in the next four years and sales of $10 billion.
The Expos and Depots "have definitely driven design," says Christopher Lohmann, vice president for Kohler fixtures marketing, which also sells its products at Sears’Great Indoors stores, "because seeing the better things inherently makes people want better design."
But instead of customers having to stretch their wallets to buy some exquisite $3,500 "melted glass" pedestal sink, Lohmann contend, there has been the "Pottery Barn effect’: You can start buying some pretty good design at a lower price."
For its part, Pottery Barn is "getting aggressively into bath and kitchen," says Celia Tejada, vice president for product development. The company launched a separate Bed & Bath catalog last May. But the "Classic Toilet" and sinks offered in the first couple of catalogs may have been too hard-core: "We did sell some, "says Tejada, "but the logistics were more than we wanted to deal with. "The catalog has retreated to the safe retail harbor of medicine cabinets, chrome shelves and other accessories.
Restoration Hardware, in catalogs and stores, hasn’t backed off yet. "The growth in the bath area has been tremendous for us in the last two, three years, "says marketing director Dave Glassman, "with consumers buying three or four sets of towel bars" at a clip. Look for more collections of towel racks and toilet-paper holders, more shower heads, faucets and sinks, he says. And, yes, that $3,600 bathtub and other big ticket items.
But all the talk of high prices shouldn’t obscure reality. Says Lohmann, "The mid-range is what makes Polo (Ralph Lauren); it’s what makes money."
Suvak chimes in that while the average price of a faucet has been going up for the past five years, it’s now just over $100 per installation. The median faucet price has gone from $79 to $89, he says.
Says Bruce Case: "You don’t find too many Taj Mahals in a 5-by-9 bathroom. The bath division’s clients are value-conscious. But typically, "he adds, "there’s one or two things they fall in love with. And those they’re willing to splurge on."