Hotel Guests Get Too Much Of a View --- Proper bathroom doors are a thing of the past

“First they came for the closets. Then they took the bath tubs. Now, hotels are stripping away the only thing separating us from the animals: the bathroom door.

 

Guests are waving goodbye to the luxury of a fully-closable opaque barrier between the restroom and bedroom, checking in to find sliding barn doors, curtains, strategically placed walls and other replacements that aren't as proficient in the art of noise and smell containment.

 

In some cases, they're not even good at hiding the view.

 

"You couldn't see the fine details, but you could see everything else," said Denise Milano Sprung of the frosted bathroom door of the hotel room she shared with her husband at the Calgary Airport Marriott. "I've been married for 25 years, I love my husband, but I don't want to see him use the restroom."

 

Sprung has spent some two decades traveling for work, her husband's speaking engagements and her sons' hockey games. The executive at a financial planning firm has come to appreciate the simplicity of the nontransparent bathroom door. Her husband usually gets up early, meaning she's often awakened by light escaping out of a door that is translucent or transparent.

 

Midprice hotel chains have long operated on thin margins. But the push to cut costs has become more urgent. Business and group travel is still lagging postpandemic, while staffing, construction and energy bills soared, said Lisa Chervinsky, a lecturer at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration.

 

The humble door can look like a money pit.

 

Closing off an often-windowless room to natural light means guests will run up energy bills and leave maintenance with more lightbulb-changing work. Concrete and wood are expensive. Door handles jam and break.

 

The Americans With Disabilities Act requires a door frame wide enough for a wheelchair. Many of the early modifications had drawbacks. Hotel architects installed pocket doors that don't require space to swing inward or outward, but have mechanisms that are costly to maintain. Curtains get dusty. Sliding barn doors have gotten more popular, but they can be unreliable closers.

 

The next front in the movement: "Can we design a room that doesn't have bathroom doors at all?" said Bjorn Hanson, adjunct professor at New York University's Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality. Some hotels have been moving the sink and shower into the bedroom and enclosing the toilet in glass or placing it in cubby-like space, which helps make the room look more spacious, Hanson said.

 

The Line Hotels uses a mix of partial partitions, pocket doors and glass in lieu of traditional bathroom doors. Stefan Merriweather, the chain's creative director, said the layout creates more space, light and flexibility -- and bathroom odors are better ventilated.

 

The ventilation defense rings hollow for critics, who say keeping the odors contained is the whole point of a sealed bathroom. Merriweather said the chain receives very few complaints.

 

The door-lite life works for some.

 

Jonathan Grubin is a frequent guest at CitizenM, which advertises compact rooms to travelers who don't plan to spend much time in them. Grubin, chief executive of product-sampling firm SoPost, said he'd rather have a functional room than one that crams all the bathroom stuff in a separate space.

 

Others aren't so laissez-faire. When digital marketer Sadie Lowell booked a twin room for herself and her father to share in London, she was horrified to find her room in the Holmes Hotel lacked a solid bathroom door.

 

The trauma inspired her to start the campaign "Bring Back Doors." Lowell has emailed hundreds of hotels with two questions: "Do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass?" She uses her findings to regularly update two lists: Hotels with bathroom doors and hotels without. The second category is subdivided into "80% privacy: sliding/slatted doors," "50% privacy: glass doors with walls," and "zero privacy: no door, no wall, or wall with window."

 

More than 500 hotels have been listed in the no-door group. Marriott, Hyatt, and Starwood Hotels declined to comment or didn't respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Holmes Hotel London, owned by PPHE Hotel Group, said the vast majority of its bathrooms include wooden sliding doors, and doesn't have plans to change that.” [1]

 

1. Hotel Guests Get Too Much Of a View --- Proper bathroom doors are a thing of the past. Deighton, Katie.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 21 Jan 2026: A1.