With a restaurant on premises overseen by culinary god/enfant terrible Gordon Ramsey and press promising that its standards will exceed those of even “the most discerning traveler,” the London NYC hotel has much boasting to live up to. One of the worst trends we find in our bathroom reviewing is that a location’s general style and decor will not be reflected in the lavatory. All too often the bathroom’s being regarded as an afterthought is quite apparent, which for us cannot help but detract from our impressions, even when visiting a destination for purposes other than bathroom reviewing (not as rare as you may think). Unfortunately, we see this in many a high end restaurant, but to its credit, the hotel industry on the whole appears more sensitive to the importance of a harmonious and well-designed water closet. Long story short: we entered the London NYC with high expectations.

The first hurdle was understanding the name. What, in particular, does this hotel have to do with London? Is there anything particularly English about it? Aside from a slight accent detected in one of the women at the concierge desk, nothing really. The designer, though, is David Collins, who is Irish-born but works largely in London…and New York. So, perhaps, the hotel’s name is an homage to the man…and if that is the case, we find it fitting, as this rates among the finest bathrooms we have encountered.

Rich browns are the motif here, found in the deep woods and brown marble utilized in the design. We will hereby respectfully decline from noting the particular pitfalls of choosing such a color scheme for lavatories. The resulting hue is one of wealth and comfort, in a fittingly understated way. This is the bathroom of someone who may have recently won the lottery but still realizes that wearing snakeskin pants to the opera is not appropriate. It may not be the august wealth of old money, but it is also not the classless posturings of the nouveau riche. An elegant touch–literally–is found on the hand towels, each inscribed with “London NYC,” just in case you were thinking of stealing them and using them at your next house party. Furthermore, this bathroom provided us with another simple yet often overlooked pleasure: easily dispensed toilet paper. How much time and energy is unnecessarily wasted when one finds oneself pulling out one square at a time because the toilet paper roll is slightly too big for the dispenser? Speaking of the stall experience, long doors add to the privacy one indeed should experience during such personal moments. Sitting in such a stall gives the feeling that you are, for however brief a period, royalty overseeing your small stately domain. Intimate lighting throughout rounds out a tasteful and refined experience. If it were any nicer and were we any crazier, we’d be tempted to eat here. But then, Mr. Ramsey would kill us.

Rating: 8

The Michelangelo Hotel looks as fancy as it sounds. The lobby boasts fanciful Victorian furniture and frames with Impressionist paintings on the walls (sorry, Michelangelo). Traversing through the marble hallway to the front desk, a staircase on the right will take you across a balcony and straight to the bathroom. If you are just meeting somebody there for “business,” they have luxurious leather seats and private phone booths made of wood (given the ubiquity of cell phones, are these booths now part of the “art,” a 20th century artifact?).

The bathroom has a light brown marble floor, a standard among the wealthy, just like adultery. The walls boast a tan canvas wallpaper adorned with landscape paintings, a safe choice, like following your father into real estate, but one befitting these environs. Against the brightness of the room are the completely black marble sinks and counter top with individual black soap and tissue dispensers. A wall hook by the urinals in the men’s room allows people to hang their trench coats, because peeing with a coat draped over one arm is so pedestrian. A wall rail allows handicapped people to use the standing urinal, a quite charitable endeavor. On the downside, the stall walls and doors are made of a cheap-looking formica and does a great disservice to the decor. However, if you are a wealthy businessman looking for a little discrete action but can’t use a proper hotel room for whatever reason, the cheap formica among all this affluence is only appropriate.

Rating: 7.5

Eateries like Cafe Metro are a dime a dozen in the city. The food is “pretty good,” and the place is well lit and colorful. Perhaps it is reminiscent of your single uncle’s apartment. The bathroom of Cafe Metro, unlike the dining area, is not so common. Located in an additional downstairs eating section, it is a very small “oner” with dark gray, brick style tiling. Theses bricks possess a natural rock look and texture to them, perhaps to provide a brief respite from the man made caverns of the New York skyscrapers. Upon further scrutiny, one may find that the toilet is slightly askew, but this does not impede its function (we like to think that about ourselves, thank you). The sink is a marvel: a white porcelain vanity trough built into a stand-alone wooden counter. Pegasus must have drank out of something like this. The faucet comes out of the wall, not visibly connected to the sink at all. Some customers wrongfully exploited such a sink and left water all over the counter.

The thought and design behind this restroom goes above and beyond the call, but there is still a problem with space. The room is very small to begin with, and a garbage can juts out from under the sink. The can is too large to fit inside properly and just gets in the way of things, like the drunk dock worker who somehow got into your last orgy. As for the soap dispenser, it helps if you work out; the mechanism needs a little firm loving. If this is the only blemish, then Cafe Metro is the equivalent of a pink topaz in the rough.

Rating: 7

The Citigroup Center building is the one that we used to joke about skiing down as kids because of its angled top. Clearly, you’d have to have some kind of hang glider, as you would fly off the side and still have about fifty stories between you and the street. Clearly, we had active imaginations as children and did not think things through. Some say that never changed. Granted, but the people who designed this bathroom did not think things through and have no imagination; at least we have one of those things. And what is the most glaring example of lazy thinking that one can find in a public bathroom? Say it with us, kids: those small ugly grey square tiles. At this location they are–wait for it–not only on the floors but also on parts of the walls. The audacity is astounding. The baby changing station is too dirty for a mid-range hooker. Look, we know most babies can’t read, but Barnes and Noble really has to be more considerate than that. The visitor is greeted by janitorial equipment; we didn’t know we were expected to clean. The hand motion sink faucets are quite difficult to negotiate, and as we stood there waving our hands under them, trying to make the water run, for a brief moment we knew what it must feel like to be panhandling for spare change on a train car when no one has anything to give. It turns out that one did not work at all. There was graffiti on the dryer, but at least it was a Dostoevsky quote. Perhaps Barnes and Noble thinks that people who are into books don’t care about bathrooms since they’re all absent-minded and in their own heads too much to notice things in the real world, like good bathrooms. Here’s the rub, Barnes: some of us do.

Rating: 4.5

Why not give the chains a chance? We did, and we found they’re called chains for a reason. Banana Republic is a respectable enough outfit, but its restrooms are still bush league. After all, everyone knows it’s just a suped-up Gap. When we visited one restroom it downright stunk, olfactorily speaking. By the looks of the offerings at the nearby Rockelller Center Concourse food court, this restroom probably loses that battle daily. The black and white-checkered floor gives the disorienting illusion that it is moving towards and away from you when you stare at it, an inevitability since nothing else here competes for your eye. In fact, it looks as if several harlequins had been hunted and their unitards stretched out on the ground as some kind of perverse flooring. Provided that this is a “flagship” location for ” B.R.” (we weren’t aware this was a fleet, but then again, retail chains love to take themselves too seriously), we figured that it would house an exemplary facility. It is, however, perfectly functional as a quick-fix, and provides a good example of a mid-range restroom. The stainless steel imported from Ukrainian materials, used for the faucets, impressed us, and the soap had a pleasant viscosity.

Rating 5.5

Large department stores love to utilize their basements, and the Bloomingdales “Lower Level” is no exception. In these subterranean shopping levels one usually finds clothing items for lepers, the insane, and men. Sometimes there’s even a cafe. The restroom here boasts the same type of door found on the 7th floor: black wooden paneling with a frosted glass center, a large rectangular Oreo for the installation art crowd. This bathroom asserts its individuality, however, with framed pictures of classic cars. It’s a somewhat obvious and uninspired choice, very “home office of a middle-aged Long Island doctor,” but here it shows that the designers were at least thinking, so we give them an “A” for effort. Towards the front of the bathroom is a private facility for the handicapped, always a thoughtful touch, except when able-bodied people use it for sex. That’s not noble, just in case you were wondering. The wallpaper is again a textured beige and certainly makes a case for wallpaper adding a warmth to bathrooms where shiny tiles cannot. For you audiophiles, the debate over analog vs. digital has it counterpart in the bathroom connoisseurship world in the form of wallpaper vs. tiling. The tiling used on the floors is tasteful, a classic white with black outlines. The sinks and mirrors are nice, but plain…the “marrying type.” However, maybe not all is as nice under the surface and a divorce would ensue down the line. A look under the hood shows the sinks are shoddily built, screws sticking out and all, just like some of the people who work in the makeup department.
Rating: 7.0

“Let’s go to Bloomy’s” has been said on the Upper East Side of Manhattan more than “let’s help someone less fortunate than us” by a ratio of 250:1. It’s an obvious destination when both looking for hats to wear to the U.S. Open or when having to take care of business if you’re in the area. Like the other big department stores it offers restrooms on several floors, and here we go all the way up to Lucky Seven…though the only lucky ones here are those whose parents at least offered to pay for the therapy after giving them credit cards but then forgetting their names.

This restroom greets you with a frosted door surrounded by black wooden paneling. It made you feel like you were about to enter a very chic bathhouse (but that’s a whoooole other kind of review). The black painted wood theme continues inside. It surrounds a full-length mirror, always a plus, especially when you’ve just gotten away with stealing an article of clothing you’re currently wearing and want to admire your sense of fashion, shoplifting skills, and general panache. The sinks are also black, a black marble, possibly unearthed from the great underground kingdom in the caves of what is now Tangier…or maybe Bloomingdale’s doesn’t go to the lengths we do for interior decorating. At any rate, they need to go to better lengths to maintain their restrooms; one toilet was out of order, and if you’ve ever studied restroom planning and crowd control you will know that just one broken toilet can create a ripple effect that results in longer lines, minor arguments, riots, and sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) death. The textured wallpaper was a very nice touch (pardon), and in general the restroom’s brightness and cleanliness made it feel radiant and pure, like a little debutante just prior to her ball…and subsequent fall into a life of petty arguments, rides to the Hamptons made more bearable by Vicodin, stuffed-shirt husbands who cheat on them daily, child bearing (but not rearing) as a form of social currency, and secret anguish over a purposeless life.

Rating: 6.5

Being that Home Depot has become the mecca for people who like to build their own homes with their bare hands, we were expecting to find a glorified port-a-potty when we went searching for the restroom in their midtown Manhattan location. Instead, we found the bathroom equivalent of a surreal blind date: not only was the person very attractive, you actually had sex at the end of it. No, that does not mean we had sex with strangers in this bathroom (were you at school the day they went over metaphors?), it just means that our expectations were thoroughly surpassed, to our utter surprise.

Not only was this bathroom clean and well-kept, time and thought obviously went into creating a mood and atmosphere. Fake potted plants greet you in the entryway and adorn the sinks, and a deep brown wooden bench sits against the opposite wall. We could already hear the people in the suburbs snickering at us New Yorkers for having such amenities in a Home Depot bathroom: “Oh, please, that’s not a real Home Depot! It looks like that guy from the Home and Garden Network designed the bathroom.” But it gets better/worse. There are framed prints of leaves with some sort of explanation about the leaf and its family in Latin. Also, someone wrote “Marcus’ daughter will give you a good blow” in Latin on one of them; we guess that’s what you’ll get in New York, especially in a neighborhood near good private schools. In addition to the mirror above the sink, there is a gold (we’re guessing fake) plated mirror on another wall, as if the designers at this point are just saying “F. you” to all the other retail store bathrooms in the area. During our brief stay here, an employee came in to clean up, even though it wasn’t dirty. We got the impression this happens regularly. The light brown painted walls complemented the rustic light brown floor tiling. And for the coup de grace: there under the soap dispensers are little bowls to catch the excess soap that may drip after you pull your hand away. Are they kidding? Obviously not. Perhaps we should have known better.

Rating: 7.5

And now, onward and upward from the Macy’s basement to the 7th floor. Whereas the color palette in the basement brought band-aids to mind, here we have that very strange combination of orange and brown. Orange and brown can work in a weird way, beautiful and ugly at the same time, a swan with fangs. Or perhaps a dove with claws. How about a hummingbird with PMS? Sorry. The orange wall tiles aren’t even that orange, so maybe we were exaggerating to waste space…it’s the holidays and we want to get to the islands already! Anyway, the stalls are a light brown that call to mind an oft-referenced mode in our bathroom observation: 1970s municipal architecture. When will it die? To make matters worse, they are made out of a light, plastic-y material. If you ran into them you may well knock them over. Isn’t that something they do in the Midwest? Functionally, the designers made the mistake of making the walkway between sink and stall too narrow. Since the stall doors open outward, you may get backsided by one while washing your hands if you’re not careful. Big points off for that; you should always feel like you can take your time washing your hands. It’s what separates us from the animals. After quickly washing up you’ll rush to the paper towel dispenser only to find it is, in fact, dirty. Tisk tisk. Maybe you should stick to the basement. That orange tiling ain’t bad, though.

Rating: 5

We had to, of course, save Macy’s for December. It’s the only department store the real Santa actually visits (at least that’s what we were told when kids—hiring a guy with a real beard goes far. Hiring a guy with real prison experience doesn’t). This entry features the facilities in the basement, often called the “cellar” in order to soften the blow. Whatever you call it, this underground level doles out full servings of overpriced food and consumerism at its best, or worst, depending on which side of the cash register you’re on.

The sinks here are band-aid colored; we didn’t know whether or not to be alarmed by that…turns out they complemented the beige marble walls quite nicely. The baby-changing station, on the other hand, did not inspire confidence; we wouldn’t trust putting a doll on it. There was, however, a well-lit sink next to it, a nice touch that earned some points. The flooring here definitely exhibited some dirt, though we must say in their defense that the color of the floor tiles is light and that Macy’s of course is a high traffic location (insert joke about young dumb female “celebrity’s” bathroom here). Even in such locations we welcome a little exposed dirt if it means the color of the floor tiles is not that ugly and depressing grey used in so many bathrooms. Whoever designed this place, though, still should have anticipated the traffic and chose another color, and/or the staff should see that it’s attended to more often. Or maybe Santa has his own private bathroom and they don’t worry as much about everyone else the rest of the year. The doors on the stalls are cabana-style, providing privacy as well as ventilation, like dark linen pants. The bathroom overall is functional but still has that unfortunate factor we call dinginess. Maybe it just goes with getting used so much (insert…).

Rating: 5.5