At your convenience

It might be the smallest room in the house and the butt of many a joke, but it is surely one of the most revealing. Bronwen Riley investigates the smartest loos in the land

- Bronwen Riley

ON arrival at a friend’s parents’ house in the deepest Massif Central, the writer John Cornwell summoned up his best prep-school French to ask discreetly for les toilettes. Taking him straight back out of the front door, his hostess exclaimed, with a dramatic sweep of her arm over the surrounding landscape: ‘Mais vous avez toute la France!’

That was the 1970s, when French plumbing (indeed, foreign plumbing of any persuasion) provoked much English sniggering, squeamishness and outright dismay. The horrors of the pissoir, petit coin and other cabinets of horrors remain part of the stock repertoire of British travellers’ tales for anyone over the age of 45.

British plumbing was still resting on its 19th-century laurels, having reached its apogee of comfort and convenience during the Regency, according to architecture historian Mark Girouard. Then, the English nobility were the envy of their Continental contemporaries, enjoying flushing water closets, bathrooms en suite and hot and cold running servants at the touch of a mechanised bell-pull.

Inventor and locksmith Joseph Bramah had patented an improved version of a water closet with valve and S-bend in 1778, which made him a household name for the best part of 100 years, until a flurry of innovations later in the 19th century by firms that are still familiar today. Dent & Hellyer’s Optimus (1870) boasted a quieter flush and illustrious patrons, including assorted British royals, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Siam.