Second in a very occasional series of looks at the furnishing in our apartment. 

Back in December, I finally got around to posting the first photos of our apartment with the furniture we spent all fall accumulating. In today’s photos, we see the furniture in the bathroom.

OK, maybe it’s a little disingenuous to include this under the topic of “furniture”, since the bathroom really has only one piece of furniture that we added.  The shower, the tub, the toilet, and the two sinks — i.e. all the main pieces of furniture — were all provided with the apartment.

Actually, the bathroom was the only room that came not only had furniture, but also with an existing light fixture:  the light that’s built into the mirror over the sinks. Have a look at the photos:

If you take a look at the third photo, you’ll see what we added: it’s that free-standing thing we’re using as a towel rack.  Technically, it’s not really a piece of bathroom furniture,  I guess. I think it’s marketed as a two-tier clothes rack for hanging your clothes on in your bedroom. However, we needed something to use to hang the bath towels on, and the only proper towel rack I ever found was too short for the long bathtowels we bought here. So, we needed to buy something since the pre-installed towel racks (there are two small ones between the sinks, and one small one behind that big free-standing unit) were just not big enough for the towel needs for two people.

The bathroom continues to strike me as a wasted opportunity in terms of allocated space in the apartment.  We still need to add some of cabinet; we’re using the baskets above the sink and under the hanging towels for the moment. So, a cabinet would take up some space along the wall, I guess. However, there’s all that free space in the middle of the room that doesn’t seem really good for much of anything. I mean, while the bathroom is really light  and airy as a room and it does have the best view from the windows (into a neighbor’s yard). But I’m not sure I’d want to set up a day bed and read a book in there, or anything.

Anyway, that’s the bathroom. Just to orient you, the bathroom is at one end of the apartment, just off the kitchen. The bedroom is on the other side of the kitchen … so you walk through the kitchen to get to the bathroom from the bedroom. The layout seemed odd when we first saw it, but now that I’m used to it, it doesn’t seem so strange.

BTW, in a typical German apartment, the toilet and sink will be in a separate room from the room with the shower and/or tub. I believe my brother-in-law Stuart was the one who first mentioned that me, actually, and we have now seen that design in several apartments here.  It’s the traditional German house-layout style, apparently. I don’t know if the original design in our building also had that, but it doesn’t now. Nope, we’re definitely 21st century in our 16th century apartment building, at least when it comes to bathrooms. 🙂