On "Garden Bathtubs"

I often say that home buyers have an "aspirational" orientation when looking for their next home. By that, I mean that buyers are not generally looking to buy a house that will feel like the last one and in which they will follow the same behaviors and patterns. Part of moving, psychologically, is the opportunity "step up" both in habit and status.

So one of the many curious items of value in any home on the market is the "garden tub." This tub is larger than a standard tub, deeper, and has a slanted back designed solely for a relaxing bath. Usually these are only in the Master Bath, are set in a corner, and often have windows above and ledges where people can place boutique shop candles, soaps, and little rolled up wash cloths like a fancy hotel.

But does anybody ever use them?

It doesn't matter. Regardless of whether people do use them, buyers want to imagine that they will use them. It's just a pleasant thought. We all want to think that we will manage to work in that Friday-night hot soaking bath with candles and a glass of wine. Sure, some people actually do this, and good for them. But whether someone does it or not is entirely beside the point because everyone wants to imagine themselves doing it.

And you can't imagine it if you don't have the tub. What a hope-crusher.

Even if you take a soaking bath in a garden tub once in a blue moon, you can bet that it will be a moment of great stress relief, a pleasure, and a great memory. Moreover, every morning and night when the owner is in the Master Bath, there will be the tub and the memory, and more importantly -- the hope -- that the moment will come again soon.

Practically speaking, garden tubs are a status symbol because they are a luxury of space. With a garden tub, the Master Bath will also feature a separate shower, and so the package creates a "luxury of space," not economy of space as would be a standard tub and shower together. The tub creates additional open space from the bottom of the tub (the floor) to ceiling that always remains open, and so opens up the feel of the Master Bath. Tub/shower combinations with a curtain or sliding doors close off the space, kill any hope of a relaxing bath, and close out light -- a triple-whammy.

So sometimes buyers' desires and choices may not appear logical. But usually upon sufficient reflection (and after witnessing the same choices and desires time and time again), the underlying logic of human nature can shine through.

"If Your Income Goes Up, Will You Watch TV in the Bathroom?"

Author of the popular book Freakonomics Daniel Hamermesh writes a regular column for The New York Times online featuring his witty log of counterintuitive economic observations.

In his book, for instance, he tells of a daycare center that, when faced with parents habitually late for picking up their kids, implemented a "punishment" fee policy to keep parents on time. Instead, however, parent pick-up tardiness actually increased, and the authors speculate that the "fee" actually served as an incentive for parents to be late because a) it ridded them of any guilt they felt for being late (since they were paying the fee), and b) the fee wasn't high enough, evidently.

Well this weekend Hamermesh recounted a recent trip to a nice hotel where he was stunned to find television screens in front of the urinals in the bathroom. I'm frankly stunned that he was stunned. Anyway, he mused in his column that perhaps as personal income goes up, so does a person's likelihood of installing media in their bathroom.

Color me unimpressed. I don't think it has to do with incomes rising so much as it has to do with technology prices falling. It's just not expensive anymore to put a television or any media anywhere one wants. The city of Shenendoah outside The Woodlands north of Houston has free Wi-Fi for all its residents. Soon they won't be exceptional for that at all.

Home builders now wire homes for surround sound -- basic homes -- because it costs them next to nothing. Production builders in recent years have been building niches for televisions in master bathrooms regularly, complete with cable hook-ups. A client recently told me of a friend in an older home who installed a television screen behind their master bathroom mirror (it shows through when the TV is on).

This isn't because people are getting rich. It's because technology is becoming ever more affordable. Cell phones used to be exotic, the idea of PC's on every desk used to be outrageous, and now we're entering an age where the desktop itself may go extinct and all software will be hosted and operated on the Internet. Check out live.com or google.com -- it's already started.

The idea is that technology is not an amenity like a swimming pool or wine cellar to be found in exclusive or more expensive homes. Instead, technology is like an amenity that starts out exclusive but then becomes a standard in short order. When my 2001 car was brand new, its navigation system was pioneering. I'm still grateful to have it, but nowadays it's far behind navigation systems that one can get inexpensively in a cell phone.

So rich or not, the day is fast coming when we'll all be watching television and surfing the Internet in our bathrooms -- and frankly anywhere else we can catch a signal. It's not a sign of wealth. It's a sign of the times.