The customer restroom for our store is being nominated for Cintas' America's Best Restroom Contest. I wanted to share with you what makes our bathroom special, who built it and what drove the whimsical design.
Our 1875 stone storefront was built to coincide with the arrival of the horse-drawn streetcar track, which was extending south from downtown Lawrence. It was built as a grocery store with a residence above. A few years later, the wood frame storefront was added next door as a butcher shop. Both buildings served the surrounding and developing neighborhoods.
Our main storefront was built of locally sourced limestone, sandstone, and wood. Even the mortar was made locally. The floor joists in the basement are supported by large Osage orange tree trunks with the bark still on them. Everyone involved with the store was local, including the craftsmen who built it, the owners, and the customers it served. They established a definite "sense of place" or as the ancient Romans would say "genius loci". I kept that in mind as I gradually fixed up the properties. For example, we primarily chose local woods; walnut, Osage orange, ash, or aromatic red cedar to build our displays and seating. When we replastered the crumbling walls, we hired Missy McCoy to paint murals inside which reflect our community's agricultural basis. The artwork of John Steuart Curry (a prominent Kansas Regionalist painter during the Great Depression) was the inspiration for the murals' subject matter. A stumbling block in the project was our dilapidated bathroom.
The once pathetic bathroom, left over from the days when this building was a pawn shop, was smaller than a phone booth. It was a rectangular box in the corner of the retail space with a plywood door, a cabinet pull “doorknob” and a hook for privacy. The sink was outside the bathroom. Due to its condition, we always told customers there was no public bathroom available. However, the requests for one kept coming multiple times a day. Something needed to be done, but how to blend this eyesore in with the rest of the store.
As we were pondering what to do about the bathroom, I had a dream. The dream featured a toilet paper dispenser located within the butt of a bas relief ceramic tile pig.
The dream also featured a peeping Tom and a milk cow with its distinctive black and white markings forming a map of the world.
When I awoke, those all seemed like cool ideas, but they were not available at my local lumberyard. Since the murals were still in the process of being painted and the subject matter celebrated the fertile abundance of Kansas agriculture and the value of work, it was an obvious choice to make the bathroom look like a barn.
I talked to my contractor friend Gary O'Doniel and we went to work. The floor around the bathroom was rotted from water damage and termites. Everything needed to be ripped out and rebuilt to provide a stable base. Local craftsman Ben Graham did the plaster work. Missy McCoy, our muralist, drew out the images for the tile work. Steve Smith did the custom tile work per Missy's drawings. It was a fun collaborative process with local talent and such creative, competent artists and craftsmen.
Everyone threw in their own ideas of what would make this project memorable. Those ideas include ceramic corn cobs on the floor, ceramic droppings on the floor from various types of farm animals, and a ceramic WREN flour sack (a brand of flour manufactured years ago at the local flour mill).
An open horse's mouth holds the mirror above the sink,
and a 1940s style pinup calendar of a filly wearing a small negligee in the style of Alberto Vargas adorns the wall.
It was a fun project which converted an embarrassing feature to one which makes people laugh out loud while they do their business. I wanted to establish that our store, from the blacksmith-made wheat shock door handle on our front door to the toilet's handle of our bathroom, that our store was squarely located in Kansas, no doubt about it. Our store would be "out of place" if it were in any other state.
Take a walk with Birkenstock.
