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Luxury in the hotel bathroom
Bathrooms represent a special kind of calling card for hotels. In the luxury segment, in particular, guests nowadays expect more than just a standard wet room. And so, as well as using exquisite materials, increasingly large glass windows to the sleeping area are being fitted, along with entertainment media or spa showers. An ever greater number of hotels are now also providing their guests with a special kind of amenity in the bathroom – shower toilets. Geberit, one of the leading providers of shower toilets, has now fitted several notable hotels in Germany with these convenient and hygienic toilets.
The most noteworthy of these is five-star superior hotel The Fontenay on Hamburg’s Outer Alster. The new building, designed by Störmer Murphy and Partners, offers guests in its hotel rooms a view from floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows, at least one balcony, generous bathrooms and separate toilets. A Geberit shower toilet from the “AquaClean Mera” range has been installed in every bathroom. The person responsible for its design was Christoph Behling, chief designer with Swiss watch manufacturers TAG Heuer. “For me, the fact that the bathrooms in this kind of hotel must be equipped with what I prefer to call a hygiene toilet is something that was obvious to me right from the outset,” explains architect Jan Störmer. The “AquaClean Mera”’s WhirlSpray technology boasts a pulsating shower jet in which the water has air mixed in with it; the toilet comes equipped with a lady wash. The drying function is performed by current of warm air. At The Fontenay the shower toilet is operated by means of a cordless wall-mounted glass control panel.
The “Classic Monochrome” suite at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Frankfurt has also been equipped with the Geberit “AquaClean Mera” shower toilet. Here, guests will discover not only its perfect cleansing technique but also its additional WC seat heating, its odor extraction and its orientation light for the nighttime. For Stefan Herborn, Geberit’s regional sales manager for exhibitions and design, a shower toilet is also more than just a normal toilet: “Like in a Bond movie, for me it is more of a gadget, one that comes packed with surprises.”
The fact that shower toilets are now no longer a privilege reserved for the premium hotel sector is demonstrated by the RiKu budget design hotel in Pfullendorf, where shower toilets from Geberit’s “AquaClean Mera” and “AquaClean Sela” ranges have been installed. Why even the operators of a midrange hotel have opted for this kind of technology is explained by Eberhard Riedmüller, CEO of Barfüßer Gastronomie-Betriebs GmbH & Co. KG and operator of the hotel: “We want to offer our guests the maximum degree of comfort possible, which is why we have opted for shower toilets in many rooms. Something particularly practical is their quiet flush – meaning that the guest in the next room is not disturbed by the sound of water flushing.”
