When design ego beats guest psychology, the stay loses.
Someone decided bathrooms no longer need doors. Not as a quirky exception. As a design stance.
Glass boxes. Sliding panels with gaps. Half-walls posing as boundaries. The pitch sounds brave and modern. The lived experience feels exposed and absurd.
The Wall Street Journal’s
Katie Deighton
<!–> recently flagged the trend. Hotels strip bathroom doors in the name of aesthetics. Designers applaud the “boldness.” Guests negotiate privacy like it is an upgrade.–>
Some may think this is not innovation. I’m here to tell you; this is theater.
Hospitality is not a photoshoot. It is a promise.
Doorless bathrooms sit inside a bigger problem: hotels keep designing for images, not behaviors. They confuse novelty with progress, then wonder why review scores limp.
A hotel room is not a showroom. It is a temporary home under stress. Guests arrive tired, jet-lagged, and overstimulated. They need legibility, control, and dignity. Design either supports that state or sabotages it.
“Design without empathy is decoration with a budget.”
Once you notice the doorless bathroom, you start seeing the full catalog of form-first decisions.
Start with transparency as a fetish. Glass walls creep into bathrooms under the banner of openness. Environmental psychology calls this a loss of perceived control. Guests experience it as awkwardness. Privacy shifts from default to negotiation. Intimacy turns performative. Romance exits quietly.
Then come the freestanding tubs, staged like sculpture in the middle of bedrooms. The typology reads luxury in a photo, but it fights use. It steals circulation space, creates slip risk, and demands maintenance the operating team never requested. Most guests ignore it, because the artifact serves the designer’s story, not the guest’s routine.
Showers follow with equal ambition and less competence. Oversized rain heads look cinematic, then deliver mist-level pressure. Water temperature swings. Drainage underperforms. A “spa-like” promise collapses into basic annoyance.
Lighting joins the conspiracy. Hotels dim rooms to manufacture mood and end up undermining task performance. Shaving requires visibility. Makeup requires color accuracy. Finding a towel at 2 a.m. should not feel like fieldwork.
Storage disappears next, dressed up as minimalism. Open closets and missing drawers force guests into clutter. The room never settles. The guest never settles. What reads clean on a rendering reads anxious in real life.
Materials flex for credibility. Concrete floors signal seriousness and “authenticity.” They also run cold, amplify sound, and punish bare feet. Acoustics turn minor noise into roommate energy. Sleep quality drops. Complaints rise.
Public spaces keep escalating the same mistake. Lobbies chase nightclub vibes: high volume playlists, hard seating, glare, and echo. Arrival becomes sensory friction. Staff shout over music. Check-in shifts from welcome ritual to crowd management.
All of this shares one root cause.
Design teams chase awards. Brands chase buzz. Operators inherit the consequences. Guests invent coping strategies.
Beauty earns its keep. If it breaks comfort, it breaks the deal.
“Comfort is not conservative. Comfort is confident.”
Hospitality design lives inside a contract. Guests trade money and trust for a set of outcomes: rest, safety, privacy, ease. When a hotel removes a bathroom door, it breaches that contract for the sake of a visual moment.
Great hotels do the opposite.
They treat design as service design. They map guest journeys. They identify friction points. They build affordances: hooks where you reach for them, shelves where your habits expect them, lighting that supports both mood and tasks, water pressure that respects time.
They ask one unforgiving question before approving any “cool” idea.
How does this feel at midnight, barefoot, annoyed, and alone.
If the answer weakens the guest, the design fails.
Bathrooms need doors. Closets need doors. Showers need pressure. Rooms need places where life can land.
Form should serve function. Always.
Anything else is content creation disguised as hospitality.
« If your room needs a disclaimer, your design failed. »
Guests notice the difference.
They always do.
Have your people call my people.
-Longing for Belonging™
Bashar Wali – ThisAssembly