Powder Room Confessions

If there is anything in my home which I love as devotedly as I love my Aga, then it must be my powder room. Just a few short years ago, when Marc and I were living in a doll-house of an apartment in Germany, I often lay in bed at night imagining how much I would revel in such luxury. Back then, our living quarters were outfitted with exactly one miniscule bathroom. The shower was so narrow that even Barbie would have had difficulty shaving her legs in it. The sink was small, the counter space nonexistent. And if the awkward positioning of the toilet was not problematic enough, the toilet paper itself was suspended on a wire from the ceiling in an otherworldly attempt to conserve space.

Besides the Herculean feat of just making myself presentable in this kind of setting, having guests over for dinner also presented a challenge. Our dinner table seated two comfortably -- three was already a stretch -- and we ate in a room that doubled during the day as the office. Squeezing people around a small table and dining by the glow of the computer did not bother me nearly as much, however, as not having a proper powder room. Any time guests would come, not only did I have to do all the shopping and cooking, but I also had to make sure that our one bathroom was dazzlingly clean. God forbid someone should find a splodge of toothpaste on the sink or an unfortunate hair on the floor.

No, back then, I could only fantasize about the carefree existence I lead now, a life completed by a small bathroom off the den reserved exclusively for dinner guests. The room is delicately scented with honeysuckle soap and quietly filled with interesting objects d'art. At the moment, I have it decorated with iridescent glass eggs made from the ashes of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Tucked away in a corner, there is salt lamp giving off a soothing orange glow, and up on a shelf, sits a yellow vase of dried thistles, a hostess gift from Scottish guests. At other times of the year, the room is filled with more exotic fare: carved wooden boxes and marble elephants from India, or a collection of mean-faced warriors from the South Seas. I do so love the paraphernalia of a well-done powder room. One of the most interesting ones I ever came across was plastered with framed report cards, diplomas and artwork from the owner's childhood in the 1950s. My mother, a hopeless anglophile, has a powder room with an English theme including wallpaper displaying a map of the island, framed bookmarks with Shakespearian quotes printed on them and a porcelain jug proclaiming in the words of Samuel Johnson that, "the man who is tired of London is tired of life."

This particular powder room is also charmingly equipped with a trick door which has been the undoing of many a dinner guest. Family members know the special knack of turning the iron knob in the wrong direction while pressing on it until it clicks, but this method is not easily explained through the door to guests who have locked themselves in -- especially if the evening is well advanced and the gin has been flowing freely. On one such occasion when Mama was having a party in honor of Julia Child's birthday, one of the guests wandered off to the powder room and never came back. She had become trapped amongst the British bibelots and ended up having to climb out the window in order to rejoin the party. Fortunately for us, she was a poised Southern lady who graciously kept her manners about the whole ordeal. She did not even complain about her exquisite clothes getting ruined when she landed in the ivy bed. At least, as my father later pointed out, she had missed the bird bath.

By now, surely, you are wondering what all of this powder-room talk could possibly have to do with the Aga? It is simply because the two things share the same tragic fate: visitors completely ignore them. Without the show-stopping element of a trick door knob, my powder room sinks sadly into oblivion. I put so much of my heart into the positioning of its trinkets, the scent of the soap, the angle of the damn lamp, and yet, at every dinner party, I am crushed anew by my guests' failure to recognize its understated genius. At the last evening we hosted, no one even ever went to the powder room! Imagine that! Certainly, I would never forego the chance to slip off to the powder room at someone else's house!

In the same way, it is a cosmic impossibility for me to imagine walking into a kitchen featuring a wine-red stove and not begin -- at the mere sight of such a marvel -- to speak in tongues. Yet my guests are never as moved as I am. They come, laugh, eat, enjoy, but at the end of any given dinner party, I am invariably deflated. No matter how jolly the conversation, how well-received the food, how fast the hours flew by, Marc finds me in the kitchen putting the wine glasses on the Aga to dry and feeling forlorn.

"Did you have a good time?" he asks.

"Well, yes, a very good time…"

"But?"

"But no one noticed the powder room or even cared about the Aga!" I whine.

"Why don't you point them out?" is his straight-forward, manly solution to such complex feminine problems.

Obviously he does not understand that to draw attention to these things would be to destroy the illusion that their beauty lies not in coincidence but in carefully crafted design. Besides, it would be tacky. No, rather than succumb to the tasteless pointing out of my own small decorating achievements, I must be content to be a voice in the domestic wilderness. And if nothing else, I can take private pleasure in the beauty of my powder room, the gleam of my claret stove and in the fact that the toilet paper is no longer suspended from the ceiling.