Designing the perfect hotel room: the shower

I travel a fair amount, so I end up spending a lot of nights in hotels. I've stayed in everything from sketchy rooms at motels with numbers in their names to a two-thousand-square-foot suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago and the Julia Child room at the Inn At Little Washington. Many of these rooms have been amazing, but none has achieved what for me would be perfection.

So, I'm going to design my own perfect luxury hotel room, in installments, as the mood strikes me. Then, all I need is a company to implement these plans. I won't even charge for the design services.

I won't be considering price. I'm describing an ideal; I expect it to be expensive.

I'm starting with the shower because it's one part of the room I will use every day.

The space itself should be larger than most hotels provide; six feet wide and six feet deep will do. There should be a place to sit at the end, not because I'll use it--I won't--but because it will appeal to others and it's a good place to put shower supplies.

Speaking of such repositories for supplies, there should be at least four large ones, two low and two high, to accommodate people of different sizes and preferences. Each should be able to comfortably hold small bottles of shampoo and conditioner (which I don't carry but recognize many do), a bar of soap, and a razor.

Built into one wall stretching from about five feet high to about six and a half feet high should be a fog-resistant mirror for shaving.

The floor and any solid walls should be tile, preferably larger pieces, and the floor tile should be heated. (Yes, I know that's tricky with water, but it's solvable.)

I mentioned solid walls because sometimes showers have glass walls. I don't care one way or the other about that, so I leave that to the implementers.

What is vital is that the space provide multiple shower heads. In addition to two large shower heads at about seven feet high, the room should provide a detachable shower head (not for me, again, but for others) and at least four others, one hitting your body at about chest height from each direction. All should be adjustable in both height and water pressure.

Water pressure is a key issue for the shower. The water stream should be intense enough that if on full you fear you may lose skin as you look like Shatner and Nimoy faking G forces. The hotel will need you to sign a waiver of liability for the damage that water pressure can do to you. Sign it and enjoy.

You'll also need to free the hotel of liability for the heat, because the water should be able to be very hot--and stay hot even if you're in the shower for a few hours. Point-of-contact heaters would be best.

The shower heads should be large, powerful (as I noted above), and in all but the case of one of the two overheads, adjustable, so you can choose your favorite type of water flow. Why two overhead nozzles? So you can have one that is a rain-type head, but with huge water pressure, and one more conventional head.

The door should have a rod--a heated one, of course--on the outside with enough space to leat you hang two large towels without them touching.

The towels should all be Liddell, of course, with at least four each per person of wash cloth, hand towel, normal shower towel, and beach towel. I leave color to the designers, but ideally the room would be both warm and cheerful.

The closest I've come to this ideal shower was in a small suite at Caesar's Palace, where the shower was all glass but had five shower heads, enough water pressure that I never had any nozzle on full, and so much hot water that after my first, half-hour shower, I couldn't tell any difference in heat from when I'd started.

I know I've omitted one shower item: the toiletries. I haven't discussed them because I have no idea what's good or what's not, so personally I don't care. So, at the risk of sounding sexist, let me say on this subject the one thing that would matter to me: The toiletries should be so exotic, so great, so expensive, and so amazing that any woman who cared about such things and who was in the room or in another room on the same trip would gush about them and steal them all to take home for her own use and maybe, just maybe, for giving to a few select friends whom she deemed worthy.

One other point about the supplies: The hotel should have tons of them, at least three complete sets in the bathroom, and it should happily replenish all of them every day when they mysteriously vanish.

Just build their cost into the bill. It's not like this is going to be a cheap room.

Other travelers and interested readers: What would you change or add?