Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Required by code, or just weird?
Polistra favors the Bungalow on grounds of practicality, but not all bungalow plans were practical. A Dover book of plans by Henry Wilson shows a consistently weird practice.
Note the toilet in a room of its own, opening to the outdoors and to the hall. There's no toilet in the bathroom.
Most of Wilson's plans have variations on this theme; in some cases the toilet room is only reachable from the outside!
I can't figure out why you'd want this arrangement. Toilet in a separate room makes sense. More privacy for the smelliest part of life. But why the outside door? Seems to be the opposite of privacy and security.
Wilson was building mainly in Los Angeles, and many of the houses are photographed as built in LA. Was this a provision of the LA housing code in 1910? A vestige of the outhouse tradition?
LA bungalow plans (in Wilson's book and several others) had another odd feature: Multi-purpose rooms with built-in folding beds. These beds were often elaborate contraptions, rotating out of a closet before folding down into the living or dining room. I strongly suspect very few of these were actually built. I've never seen them in Okla and Kansas bungalows.
Later: No, the toilet it wasn't LA code. This 1911 journal of Domestic Engineering has a compendium of city plumbing codes (p.57), and LA didn't have any restrictions on location of toilets.
¶ 4:20 AM 
Note the toilet in a room of its own, opening to the outdoors and to the hall. There's no toilet in the bathroom.
Most of Wilson's plans have variations on this theme; in some cases the toilet room is only reachable from the outside!
I can't figure out why you'd want this arrangement. Toilet in a separate room makes sense. More privacy for the smelliest part of life. But why the outside door? Seems to be the opposite of privacy and security.
Wilson was building mainly in Los Angeles, and many of the houses are photographed as built in LA. Was this a provision of the LA housing code in 1910? A vestige of the outhouse tradition?
LA bungalow plans (in Wilson's book and several others) had another odd feature: Multi-purpose rooms with built-in folding beds. These beds were often elaborate contraptions, rotating out of a closet before folding down into the living or dining room. I strongly suspect very few of these were actually built. I've never seen them in Okla and Kansas bungalows.
Later: No, the toilet it wasn't LA code. This 1911 journal of Domestic Engineering has a compendium of city plumbing codes (p.57), and LA didn't have any restrictions on location of toilets.
¶ 4:20 AM
