The ideal number of bathrooms in a mid-century home

18 min readSo, how many bathrooms does your mid-century house really need?

Let’s start with some history. (You knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

Indoor plumbing has only been the standard for about the last 100 years. And early in that timeframe it was still far from universal. Mid-century homes were built during a massive infrastructure boom, but even then, most builder-grade ranches were designed with a single family bathroom. Like so many mid-century-house-related things, the real shift happened in 1954 with the introduction of the 30-year mortgage. These loans fueled bigger homes and higher expectations. By 1955, the “Parade of Homes” booklets were suddenly bragging about two-bath floor plans.

Fast forward to today. Current census data shows that only 3% of new homes are built with one bathroom or less. We’ve certainly added more bathrooms, but does “more” always mean “better”?  

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IMO…not really. Bathroom space is expensive, complex, and high maintenance. A bathroom requires plumbing, electrical, tiling, and cabinetry.  All of my clients and students have competing priorities and limited resources. While a nice bathroom or a more convenient arrangement is often one priority, it’s rarely highest on the list. For this reason, I’m always more inclined to design one high-quality bathroom and a powder room that work for the client rather than trying to squeeze in three or four underused spaces that just end up being more to clean.

Now, for any household with more than one person having at least two toilets really is a gamechanger. It makes for a more pleasant…and less stressful…use schedule. It can also help prevent bottlenecks where one person showering holds the whole house hostage. With a focus on good design, we can often achieve a client’s goals using less and less expensive space.

And there are times when you really do need to add a bath! In those cases, the smartest approach is usually to keep a new bathroom within the existing footprint over your existing foundation. Then, push less expensive/complicated space (bedroom or closet or social space) into the addition.

Can you ever have too many bathroom, though? I recently consulted with a client who was dreaming of a five-bathroom layout for their Seattle area ranch. The goal was to accommodate kids, extended family, and long-term guests.

Now, I can certainly see the appeal of having a dedicated space for everyone. But some of those bathrooms will end up in use just a few times a year. And if you have to sacrifice in daily use areas to make these expensive “sometimes” spaces happen, is it worth it?

Maybe. We provided options with fewer bathrooms in convenient locations and an option with all the baths to help this client think through the best solution for their life.  

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

How many bathrooms does your mid-century house have? How many does it need? Longtime listeners, you won’t be shocked that today I’m going to tell you it depends. But I do have some opinions and some examples to discuss.

I’ve done several master plans in the last year on homes that have only one bathroom, and in at least one of the options we presented, we’re keeping it that way. I also just encountered my first client who had their reasons for wanting as many as five bathrooms in a mid-century house. I’ll give you the short, short version of my solution for them there. Sure, we can. And here are some other nice ways we might not need five.

If you’re planning on updating, upgrading, or just making the most of the bathrooms you already have in your mid-century house, you’ll find today’s episode interesting. And I’d love to hear your opinions on the subject of how many is too many as well. Hey there. Welcome back to Mid-Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2505.

Okay, so this is an interesting one. I’m gonna begin with history. Of course. Of course I’m gonna begin with history. We’re talking about bathrooms in mid-century houses. How many are too many, how many is normal, but I want to think not just about how many houses were built into mid-century homes, uh, and how many we think of as the norm today in homes that have been added onto, remodeled in the past, improved to modern standards, but also the history, maybe quickly, of bathrooms inside American homes, which has only been a default option for about the last hundred years.

In the early 1900s, indoor plumbing was found in luxury homes and in cities, but not in rural or suburban areas. Tenement housing and lower income housing in cities still had outhouses. There was not universal plumbing in metropolitan areas. Think of it this way: flush plumbing requires the water to flush from somewhere and to somewhere. So that means infrastructure. And in the early 1900s, America mostly didn’t have it.

In the 1920s, um, and I don’t know this for a fact, but in my opinion, partly as a result of the 1918 flu pandemic, there was, here’s what there was, in the 1920s, there was, and I think that’s why, a big push for more modernized hygiene options in a lot of different parts of life. This is when we started to see, um, well, where there were bathrooms, we got these tiled walls going either halfway up the wall, around the entire space, or all the way up.

We got a desire to bleach things, to clean things, to have cleanable, visibly clean surfaces. And in the same vein, we got a desire for houses with interior fitted plumbing. This was often described as a three-piece bathroom, a sink, a toilet, and a tub in new construction at that time.

And it went hand in hand with the rise of a couple of major cumin companies that still exist today, Kohler and Crane, come to mind, both dating from that specific era, and they started to mass market enamel-covered plumbing fixtures, the kind of things we think of today as very hygienic, very easy to, you know, spray with something and swipe down with something and call it clean and feel good about that.

In the 1930s, you might have thought that the depression and economic lack would have slowed down both new home construction and putting more bathrooms or putting bathrooms, period, into homes, but that went hand in hand, or conversely, with the federal government under the Roosevelt administration pushing big on infrastructure projects.

So if you’re familiar with the Rural Electrification Act, that was a move to bring electricity out to ex-urban parts of the country, one um line along the roadway at a time, there were also Works Project Administration-funded sewer projects tying existing municipal areas together into new sewerage range systems and also getting modern plumbing out into rural areas.

So by the time we hit we get past the bottleneck in building of World War II, and we hit the kickoff of the mid-century era of construction, more than 80% of homes in America, old and new, had indoor plumbing, either newly constructed or retrofit. So far, so good. But this is a transition from zero bathrooms to one bathroom, and we’re gonna talk about bigger integers for the rest of the episode.

Now, maybe not every home, like literally every home in the mid-century era, had indoor plumbing, but I think we can generalize and say that yes, mid-century homes from the very earliest part of that build boom had indoor plumbing. They had one bathroom, but they mostly had just one bathroom, unless it was a really nice home, a cut above.

A few exceptions to that. In areas of the country where there was a basement by default, like for example, across the whole upper Midwest, where the four-foot frost protected footing rule means you’ve got to be digging down into the ground at least four feet to set the foundation of the house. And once you’ve gone down four feet below grade, if the house, if the main level of the house is gonna be about 18 inches above grade, you’re really only digging a few more feet down, you might as well put a full basement under it.

Also, we live in tornado country, so let’s have a basement. Um, anyway, in a home where a basement was, you would probably find not a bathroom in the basement, but an open toilet sitting next to often the laundry. Um, I’ve heard about this phenomenon. It existed in my own 1952 home when I moved into it. Um I’ve experienced it in many, many clients’ houses.

And over time, I’ve heard a bunch of different stories about why this is true. The one that I hear from some plumbers is that you just need to have some sort of a fixture in the basement to test backwash, to have a relief for the floor drain, to have something that you can flush and check on. It’s a convenience thing. Uh, and then the other thing I’ve heard that I think makes a whole lot of sense is that the basement toilet right next to the laundry was often the diaper toilet.

That to me is borne out by the places that I also find a toilet, even in homes that don’t have a basement. I was just talking to a potential new client this week about their quite nice, they’re sort of designerly architect-created, every fine feature that could possibly have been jammed into the house, 1953 home. Um, it has, it actually has a Jack and Jill bathroom, so kind of like a bath and a half.

And separately, it has a little room off of the Eat-In kitchen area that has a powder bathroom, a toilet and a sink, and the laundry. And they, when they first moved into the house, were kind of weirded out by that. But over the last year, as they’ve been living with it, they actually can kind of see the convenience. It’s nice to have a powder room. They don’t mind having the sink and the laundry together. And again, to me, that’s perfect evidence of this is the diaper toilet. This is the winch rinse it out, swish it out, flush it, throw it in the laundry. The 1950s solution to we didn’t have disposable diapers yet.

One way or another, though, that house, I mean, that house has a bunch of great pictures. It’s got woodwork galore; it’s got uh masonry hearth that goes inside and outside. It’s got a stone planter in the same masonry that comes into the entryway. It has a ring lighting system of like cove lights that go all the way around the exterior walls above the beautiful. It’s got windows all over the place, it’s practically wrapped in glass.

And I think they told me that cove lighting has 52 fluorescent tube bulbs that they’ve been slowly replacing with LED. Anyway, I’m getting off the subject of bathrooms. But so that is a 53 house, but an outlier example. In your much more classic, modest, builder-grade, mid-century ranch house, and I’ll pill for an example of my own, but I’ve seen this countless other places over the last decade.

Um you see one family bathroom on the main floor, and if there is a basement, one toilet in the basement, and that’s it. This starts to change with uh not just convention, not just what people wanted, but with affordability. So it’s really fun. You can see this in the rise of the middle class home building. Homes start to get nicer, they get a little bigger each year through the mid-century era to the point that they basically had doubled in size from the 50s to the 80s.

And the features that they have also goes up. But the real jump happens in one year in 1954 with the introduction of the 30-year amortized mortgage by Act of Congress. In 1955, you see houses are instantly featuring more than one bathroom in the house.

In Madison, we’ve got the archival evidence of the literature for the parade of homes that happened every year from 1952 onwards to this very year. Um, and in 52, the things they have to say about the house, the various houses, there’s like 13 models in the 1952 um parade booklet, and the things they are bragging about are so modest. And in one house, they do a whole little spread, advertising copy, and a photo to advertise that this bathroom in this house, the one bathroom in this house, has a vanity cabinet and a mirror. Just, you know, sit down for that. Um, just a few years later, in 1955, the parade of homes is a completely different animal.

Now we’ve got butterfly roof lines, we’ve got split levels, we’ve got a den and a living room, and then also in addition, we’ve got a couple of owner suites, and we’ve got a couple of powder rooms for the social area. So as we fast forward through the intervening decades, home sizes expand.

It gets more common to have more bathrooms and new builds, and two-story and split level homes become more popular into the 60s, into the 70s, it becomes pretty typical to have a bathroom on each floor of the house, not usually in a split level. In a split level, if it’s three floors, you often have a bathroom on the bedroom level and then one on one other level.

If it’s a four-level split, you often have bathrooms stacked above each other on two of the floors and not two of the other floors. But in a house that has, for example, bedrooms above, main floor living on the ground level, and then a basement below, you’ll have a bathroom on each side. On each level. Current census data shows that 3.1% of new single-family homes built in 2020 had one full bathroom or less. 3%.

Sorry, I’m surprised by that. I didn’t catch the first time I read this. Only 3% of new homes have one bathroom or less. 27% had three full bathrooms, and 7% have four or more full bathrooms. Anecdotally, I just visited some friends in Canada as they were about to build, uh move into their new build townhome, and it had well, I think of it as four bathrooms, three and a half, technically, a powder room on the main floor, a basement that had a guest room in it.

So the guest room needed a full bath so that people could enjoy living down there, especially because if they came up one level, they could use just a toilet, but they couldn’t take a shower, they’d have to go up two flights of stairs in order to use the family bathroom. And then on the upper level where the bedrooms were family bathroom and owner’s bathroom.

Four people live in this house, four bathrooms for four people. It they like everything else about the house. I’m not criticizing it, but it does strike me as a lot. If I were moving into that house, I would be thinking about doing nothing but scrubbing bathrooms day in and day out for the rest of my life, de-griming one surface after another until I just started over again. So when we are thinking about mid-mod remodel, making changes to existing mid-century homes, your preferences and your hosting and your guest needs and your family rhythms are going to be the biggest driver of what’s important to you.

But as a designer, I find two things generally to be true. It is intensely convenient for any household with more than one person living in it to have two separate bathrooms. Two bathrooms is better than one. That way, any individual person needing the toilet does not cut off the rest of the household from the bathroom.

One person taking a long shower doesn’t mean everyone else in the house is waiting to pee in the morning. But on the other hand, I’m not wild about designing a lot more bathrooms than that. I will always work with my clients to meet their desires. But I have a general feeling, not only my personal unhousewifely impulse to avoid house cleaning where I can, but bathrooms are an expensive room.

They’re expensive to create, they’re expensive to remodel, they have the potential to go wrong, they take up square footage in the house they need to create them a plumber, an electrician, a mechanical, engineer, uh, or installer. They need tile, they require to be lovely, not just functional, nice built-ins, and not the cheapest of tile. I would rather have two really nice bathrooms rather than three or more mediocre ones in a layout update.

Maybe I dislike cleaning tile surface more than the next girl, but I really don’t want to be responsible for that. There are, however, certain situations that can require adding in a bathroom. It’s unlikely if we encounter, if I’ve got a client that’s already living in a house, the three bathrooms, we’re not going to decommission one of them, typically, unless we have a pressing need for some other use for that space.

Um, but in cases where we need to add a bathroom, those could come up in households with multiple teens in the house, or preteens who are already arm wrestling over bathroom space. Households where adults need privacy from the kids, long travel distances within the house.

So if you’ve got even just two, if you’ve got two back-to-back plumbed bathrooms in the bedroom area and it’s a relatively sprawling house, perhaps with additions that have reached out beyond the previous social core, and you’ve got guests who would have to traverse the entire house and go into your private area in order to use a bathroom. It starts to become very logical very quickly to have a powder bath near the social part of a house.

And if there’s a guest room separated from the main living area, it starts to become very practical to have a guest bath that might be the kind of place where someone can shower. This travel distance thing also comes up with the number of floors in the house. And because I work in mid-century houses, the homes I am most typically working on are main floor, everything on one level, possibly with or without a basement underneath it, split levels, and that’s it.

The number of times I work on a house that actually has a main floor and an upper floor are so vanishingly rare. If I thought about it for a minute, I could probably put them all in one hand. Maybe two. This is a hundred plus master plans. Hundreds and hundreds of houses I’ve consulted on over the last decade. That’s it.

So in a mid-century house, typically we’re talking about a just a two-floor maximum, maybe just one. Everything in Florida is gonna be likely one floor in the classic mid-century sense. Most things. In the desert south. Yeah, so thinking about why it would be beneficial to add on bathrooms and how to add them on.

I’ve talked about how to practically add on a bathroom before, and this is a philosophy I think about whenever I need to place a bathroom in a house that doesn’t have that bathroom yet, needs one more, is if we’re putting on an addition, most common situation, we have a house that has never had an owner suite before, and the current owners would really like to have an owner suite. The default people top and think of is like I have my bedroom, and what I want is a bathroom in addition to it, so I should put on an addition to the house, and that addition could should contain the bathroom and maybe a closet.

But that is not the ideal in most situations, because putting new plumbing outside the existing footprint of the house is going to be much more expensive, cause insulation issues, be more longer supply lines, it’s just more complicated in every way. Instead, what you typically want to do is put a bathroom in the footprint of the existing bedroom and then push the bedroom out.

Not only does this keep the bathroom over the existing slab, crawl space, or basement, um, but also then the new pushed-out edition bedroom gets potentially three sides of view. It gets the most opportunity for good views, and it just functions so much more successfully. I do think though, I’ve had a couple of clients recently come to me with homes that had just one bathroom.

Um, in one case, the owners had already done a remodel project in the last uh five years previously, and they’d combined two small bathrooms into one generous-shaped bathroom that had room for a shower and a tub, like an onsen style soaking tub. Really nice, spacious, bright, airy, in the footprint of formerly two small bathrooms. Two small bathrooms? Huh. Um, and they were perfectly happy with that.

But now as their daughter is approaching her preteen years, they’re thinking they don’t even need so much as another bathroom with a shower. But it would be nice to have two is better than one, another toilet seat somewhere in the house. So we’re exploring options to most simply to the main floor layout, put that in the basement.

Could it be combined with some sort of mudroom entry from the garage? Can it be cut off of the kitchen area? What’s the most practical place to do that? The answer is still TBD because that project is in design right now.

Um, and then another project we wrapped up recently was an interesting one. It had been in the mode of many mid-century houses. It was built by the current owner’s father for her childhood family. And when she had two siblings, it was a two-bedroom house.

And then they had more siblings, and he pushed on and expanded into a porch area and made another bedroom. And then I think eventually there were six kids all living in the house at once. It never had more than three bedrooms. It never had more than one bathroom.

The thing I constantly I mean, I don’t think it’s a there’s not a moral value judgment against it, but I think it’s hilarious how we’re always adding on to mid-century houses today. We need an owner’s bathroom, we need more bathrooms for guests, etc., for household sizes that are demonstrably smaller than the original people who lived in and occupied those homes.

Next door, um, my no, two houses down. My new neighbors are a family with one kid, and the original owners were a family with six kids, and the new folks have put in a bathroom that was not there in the six kid era. Anyway, um, so within this house that her father had built and added on to in a very ad hoc manner, as absolutely needed over time, they now it had been um in her after her parents passed away, it was hers, and she had her siblings come and her kids come, and it was sort of like a vacation summer home.

She and her husband have been living overseas for quite a while. They’re about to retire and come back, and they want to live in this house together. And it’s interesting, we have in their mind the potential to just keep that one original bathroom because she remembers it from always.

And in fact, it’s just gonna be two people living in the house, but they’re going to have adult kids come and visit, they’re going to have um maybe long-term other adult couple friends come and stay. And it’s pleasant in that case to have a private guest bathroom.

So we actually did design schemes where we had just one bathroom in the house, one where we kept just that original bathroom and put a bathroom into the basement where we’ll be newly finished and there may be a guest space, and then one where we actually also have that bathroom as a social bathroom, a defined owner’s bathroom, and a bathroom in the basement.

Everyone has to make this choice for themselves. Again, I don’t think that there’s a like a moral value to be ascribed to it, but there is absolutely a dollar cost to the number of bathrooms, the number of fixtures, the number of linear feet of piping, the number of square feet of tile, how many cabinets you’re gonna install.

And so I guess I thought I wanted to do this episode not to really dictate from on high the correct number of bathrooms for a mid-century home, but simply to state that it has purpose to think about. If you’re too crunched right now, that’s very understandable. If you are any modern household living in just one mid-century era bathroom, it’s probably got a particularly snug layout, minimum viable dimensions, and you may be taking turns, waiting to get out of the house in the morning, waiting for shower time at bedtime.

It may feel like a pain point, and that is totally viable. But then the question is how to go a reasonable amount up in scale. So in the end, I want to talk about this household where the client requested as many as five bathrooms. From what had it been before? Two. It was a walkout basement ranch, post and beam structure in Seattle, Washington.

You enter on the upper, the Main floor from one side, and then it’s cut into a hillside. So from the other side, you step out from an unfinished basement and garage below. This household has been living in a very crunched space for a very long time. So they are feeling an intense bottleneck effect. And they’re trying to plan a remodel that will really suit this house for them and their growing family.

Right now, their boys are bunk beds in one bedroom. They’d like to get them their own bedrooms. And they have a number of members of extended family, one who has already stayed with them in this existing pinch point, and others who may need a place to land. So they’re thinking of also the house has major maintenance issues. A bunch of things need to happen.

They’re thinking a bunch of hypotheticals. What could they want? What do they want? What’s the most they might want? And because they’re hoping the bedrooms on the main floor right now are all very small, they are planning to move two bedrooms downstairs into the basement no matter what. So we suddenly go from having an unfinished basement that does not need a bathroom to having a basement that needs at least one bathroom to serve bedrooms down there. Then they also thought downstairs might need a guest room and a kids’ room. So maybe it should have a guest bath and a kids’ bath.

And then upstairs, the owner’s bathroom would stay. Possibly another bathroom for another bedroom staying upstairs, possibly just a powder for social services. And then they also were curious about a mother-in-law suite, either attached or detached on the property that would need its own bathroom as well. That’s how we get to five.

And I can see the argument. But also to think about where could we get proper double duty? Where could we have a distribution of bedrooms that would need fewer bathrooms? Where could a guest space possibly share if it was never going to be, for example, an actual ADU, but it was always going to be in-law suite. Could that share with guest space? Could the guest bathroom downstairs also just be the kids’ bathroom? That would bring us down to four.

Uh, I think in every case we did preserve an owner’s bathroom upstairs, which meant we had to have two bathrooms upstairs, but that they had to express that that was important to them. But in another case, that could have been a sacrifice, just one bathroom upstairs that serves both the parents’ bedroom, an occasional guest bedroom, and any guests that come over and use the kitchen, the den living room.

So this is always going to be a place where we start doing bubble diagrams, we start thinking about adjacency, we start thinking about high, medium, and low solutions. And I wonder what’s come up for you as you’ve thought about this episode. Hopefully something.

If you had strong opinions on the too few number of bathrooms your home had when you moved into it and what you had to do about it. Or the situation you’re in right now that’s driving you up the wall and what you’d like to do about it. Or the sufficiency of bathrooms in your home that you feel no need to change whatsoever.

I’d love for you to reach out, shoot me an email, or better yet, reach out to me on Instagram at Mid Mod Midwest, and um let me know what you think about the ideal number of bathrooms in any home. Particularly in a mid-century home, particularly in your mid-century home. Okay, so I think I forgot to say it at the top of the episode, but you’ll find show notes for this episode at midmodest.com slash 2505, and we’ll probably put in a few maybe a floor plan or two, maybe a screen grab from several of our recent bathroom sketches.

And I will link to a fun website where I got some statistics on the history, some of the data that I shared about the percentages of bathrooms in various eras. Um, but also if you’re curious, you can check out any of the other episodes in this season or go to midmod-midwest.com and search for bath, and you’ll find a bunch of owner suite edition examples, best practices in mid-century design of bathrooms, etc. etc.

I’ll be back next week to talk not about the proper number of bathrooms, but about how those bathrooms should perform mechanically. Do you need natural light and natural ventilation in your mid-century bathroom? By the building code of that time, you certainly did. Today you are not required to, and yet a landlocked bathroom is about my least favorite thing to do. If I feel really painted into a corner design process, we’ll consider it. We’ll like to, but I don’t like it.

So we’ll talk about bathroom layout challenges and how to get fresh air and daylight into them next week. And that is all for now, mid mod remodelers. Catch you next week.

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