Posted on: Friday, June 6, 2003
Outdoor showers offer feel of freedom, relieve stresses of life
By Gaile Robinson
Knight Ridder News Service
| Powering up an outdoor shower
• Placement: Most outdoor showers have two or three sides. If you incorporate the wall of an existing structure, such as the house or garage, there is less expense. The shower walls should be low enough to afford a good view from inside the shower and high enough to prevent one from the outside in. • Plumbing: Repairs are inevitable, so make sure you have easy access to replacement parts. • Amenities: You need at least two towel racks or hooks. One for your towel and one for your clothes. Ledges for soap and shampoo are also essential and, while you're at it, incorporate some plant shelves into the design. • Think green: If at all possible, reuse the runoff and use biodegradable bathing products. • Safety: Use a nonskid surface, and watch for mossy buildup on bricks and wood, which can become slippery when wet. Highly diluted muratic acid from swimming-pool supply stores can alleviate this problem. • The kids: Because it is different, they might resist at first and then become ardent converts. Let them conduct their 45-minute water festivals (which they call "baths") outside. The plants will love them for it. |
If your eyebrows shot off the top of your forehead at the idea of au naturel in the back yard, read no further. You are too modest to contemplate the sybaritic pleasures of showering under the stars. Shoot, even showering in the early morning is pleasurable, accompanied by the sounds of the birds and basking in the heat of the sun. And if you have to ask, the answer is "yes," there are usually privacy walls surrounding an outdoor shower.
Gregg Howard of Fort Worth starts his mornings with an outside shower. When he worked at a bank, showering outdoors provided relief from his strait-laced work life. "I always felt like I had an edge on everyone else. It's so freeing," he says.
Howard, now a real estate developer, and his partner, Todd Edson, installed an outside shower as a practical measure that morphed into a daily indulgence. "We'd get filthy working outside, so we used it like a mudroom so we wouldn't track up the house," Edson says.
Their shower, with both hot and cold water, is used at least seven months of the year, they say.
East Texas jewelry artists Zeke Zewick and Marty Flanagan are from hardier stock — they say they use their outdoor shower almost 10 months of the year. Theirs resembles an art installation. The three-sided structure is larger than many tract-house bathrooms and is artistically decorated. It was installed because the bathroom inside the house they built themselves has only a bathtub.
The two regularly travel to art fairs and spend "at least 100 nights a year in motels," says Flanagan. After building her outdoor shower, with its spacious interior and its views of the surrounding woods, she says the confines of a traditional bathtub/shower arrangement make her feel claustrophobic. Her shower is one of the things she misses most when on the road.
The secret pleasure of bathing al fresco is apparently not such a great secret. Resorts are finding private outdoor showers to be a positive selling point. Hotels in places as far-flung as Fiji, the British Virgin Islands, Mexico and the Maldives are onto the trend. And these are not economy-rate places.
Naturally, this phenomenon has not gone without a retail response, with outdoor shower structures readily available at all price levels, from free-standing plumbing units ready to be connected to the house's water supply to simpler units that connect to the garden hose. This summer, Target is selling a one-piece nyatoh wood unit with a shower head, vertical water pipe and small platform for $90.
The Sharper Image catalog, www.sharperimage.com, sells a solar-heated outdoor shower for $299. The unit can be placed just about anywhere the garden hose goes and provides 5 gallons of sun-warmed water.
