It began, innocently enough, with plumbing issues.
Tracy Ballard and her husband, John Gorman, wanted for nothing, really. They needed only to fix the master bathroom, at the time a straightforward, utilitarian affair from the 1940s, typical of Cleveland Park row houses. It had a sink, a toilet and a little, leaking shower stall.
Being fairly well-off -- she is a Federal Trade Commission lawyer; he runs his own consulting company -- they began to imagine the possibilities. Gorman conjured up business trips to the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. Ballard drifted back to their honeymoon in South Africa. And soon enough, they found themselves with a shower so large and luxurious that Ballard could say last week, "Let's go in here."
It is nearly nine feet by four feet, a palace of iridescent glass tile, a human carwash with five shower heads, four body sprays, instant steam, a soaring skylight and portable speakers connected to a wireless iPod transmitter -- the better to transport the bather into realms of transcendent splendor.
"Yeah, we ended up going all out on it," Ballard said, as her 2-year-old, Ava, ran ovals inside. "We joke that it's a room for the entire family."
The average American home has gotten larger, and, for its own reasons, so too has the bathroom. But more to the point, as surely as coffee has become vanilla latte, the lowly, humble bathroom has become, in the words of one purveyor of fine fixtures, "pimped out." Or, as a woman who gave in to the tendency put it, "hedonized" -- decked with items such as Tunisian mosaic tile and antique limestone floors recovered from French chateaus.
Although the definition of luxury is an ever-shifting and largely subjective one, analysts who track spending on luxury goods say it has increased faster than the economy, driven by the seemingly insatiable appetite of middle- and upper-middle class Americans for ever-more luxurious lifestyles, even in the bathroom. Spending on luxury bathrooms -- those costing at least $8,000 -- will be $22 billion this year, compared with $7.3 billion in 2003, according to the Market Forecast Report, published by the trade magazine Kitchen and Bath Business.
‘Hedonistic spaces’
That is 10 times what the U.S. government will spend on AIDS research this year. It is six times the annual budget of Kenya.
"For me, it was always a get in, get out part of the house," said Sandy Schlachtmeyer of Alexandria, who is trying to understand the trend. "Then these hedonistic spaces got to be standard, or expected, or something."
Seeing the fancy new bathrooms in her neighborhood, including a tub with a "waterfall" feature, she became concerned that no buyer would ever want her 1960s-era ones. So she went to a designer who introduced her to the world of $70-per-square-foot stones, $600 Hansgrohe faucets and $10,000 tubs.
"I wanted to do Formica," Schlachtmeyer said, but her designer objected. "She said, 'You can not do Formica.' "
Schlachtmeyer was conservative, but still, in the master bath, she sprang for Dornbracht faucets, two vessel sinks and a glass-paneled shower. And in a downstairs powder room, heated floors.
"The tiles heat the porcelain on the toilet, and the porcelain heats the wood seat," Schlachtmeyer said, with a note of glee. "It's controlled by the thermostat on the wall."
On a recent Saturday in Georgetown, people drifted in and out of Waterworks, for some the high church of luxury bath fittings, where tubs, like sports cars, have names.
The free-standing Beaumont model, for example, starts at $8,000 (primed but not painted); the copper Clothilde, $29,000.
"This is the tub like the Roche-Bobois!" a man said longingly, walking over to a vast, sculptural oval.
"It is!" a woman said. "Amazing."
Upstairs, amid crackled tiles, a sort of luxury arms race was evident.
In one corner, Chris Becker, 29, a government program analyst who lives in Arlington, browsed $750 Victorian shower heads that he said amounted to a "guilty pleasure."
"I have problems with it, actually," he said, noting that his kitchen has appliances, all top-of-the-line and vastly superior to the kitchen of his youth. "Part of me looks at this as so excessive and something I almost don't deserve."
Perusing the same fixtures, Hollis Freimark of the District said that in her view, the store was too "geared toward the masses" to be luxury.
"I guess this is great for your first house. . . .," she said. "If we want to bump it up, we have to go to the trades, see what's coming over from Asia and Europe."
Or, as Barry Goldberg, vice president of Union Hardware in Bethesda, put it: "A $300 faucet is almost on the verge of becoming a commodity."
He sat one afternoon next to a clear glass vanity with goldfish swimming inside.
$10,000 tubs
Business is up, he said, from people coming in to buy a $10,000 tub to those experiencing their first taste of extravagance, in the form of a $10 crystal cabinet pull.
Lately, chromo therapy has become popular: tubs featuring various colored lights to help treat seasonal affective disorder.
"There's some kooky, weird thing going on right now with relaxation," Goldberg said. "We just suck it up. I think, as a society, we seem to be focused on getting out of our woes and emulating someone else's life. You know, 'Jessica Simpson has a beautiful bathroom. Gee, she must really relax in there. I want one.' "
Indeed, one measure of the proliferation of luxuriousness is to survey what has become standard throne-room fare in new homes on the suburban fringe.
"What is typical is a large soaking tub, a shower that is three by four feet, dual vanities, his and hers," said Lee Golanoski, director of design for Toll Brothers Inc., one of the largest builders in the country. Even so, he said, people are asking to "option up."
"You can option up the size of the shower to an ultra shower that makes it 3.5 by five feet and dual shower heads," he said. "And now, we've created an option called luxurious master bath, which takes that a step further, even adds his-and-her toilets in private rooms. . . . Master baths are bigger than most secondary bedrooms, usually. It's another place to lounge."
That is how Eddie Burka, a retired real estate investor, has come to think of the bathroom in his Alexandria condominium. In fact, it might be said that it all begins with the Eddie Burkas of the world and trickles down from there.
He recently spent approximately $120,000 on his bathroom, where he often lounges for a good hour in the morning, watching the "Today" show from the tub.
"The floors are heated marble," he said, walking across them. "This shower's got a heated mirror, so I can shave in the shower . . . the shower sprays, they pulsate, they vibrate and all that stuff."
He was rather blase? about it all at this point. This week, he and his wife were flying to the North Pole to see polar bears.
"In here," he said, heading to the tub area, "this is a Jacuzzi tub. I got a TV set in here," he said, clicking on his 13-inch plasma with a remote.
And then, he said, he has his Toto toilet.
It comes with a control panel, and that is all that will be said about that.
Which leaves the question of why -- why Brazilian Uba Tuba when Formica will do?
Number one, said Michael J. Silverstein, senior vice president of the Boston Consulting Group and author of the book "Treasure Hunt," about luxury spending, "it's a reflection of the greatest accumulation of wealth in mankind's history."
Number two, said Sandy Schlachtmeyer of the heated tile floors, there is a sort of economic peer pressure at work.
‘The final frontier’
"We felt pressured by all these enormous bathrooms, by all this marble and slate," she said. "It had to be done. . . . Maybe this is the final frontier."
For Tracy Ballard and John Gorman -- who said his new shower is "awesome!" -- the reasons had more to do with how much better they imagined their lives could be. They both work. They both get ready at the same time in the morning. They have two young children.
"We have neither the time nor the channels to decompress," Ballard said. "So we thought, 'Okay, we can create a spa-like ambiance.' "
And so, she and her husband, and at times, their two kids, have at last found a way to spend more time together.
"It's become an all-purpose room," Ballard said. "We make a date for spa night, talk about our day and relax . . . My husband is like, 'I can't believe we have this in our house,' " she said.
Jerry Weed, owner of Kitchen and Bath Studios in Chevy Chase, takes the longer view of the situation, having witnessed the first big Jacuzzi craze years ago.
"You know, two-person tubs where people were gonna get all sudsy and make passionate love," he said. "That wasn't gonna happen."
"But," he said, "it is what it is. We have a higher standard of living. Will it last forever? Probably not. We just happened to come along at a good point in history."