At their level, you're playing a game of golf and also closing a hundred-million-dollar deal. Why not?Fewer people at the upper levels of hotel lodgings are going away exclusively on business." . Conducting a guest on a tour of the hotel recently, Lee noted, "A large percentage of our clientele is high-end leisure. Ask Uncle Sam." Tsao & McKown made the bathrooms appear larger by unifying the materials, in this case "stainless-steel counters with an integral sink."

There's a "generational shift," he maintains, particular to the exacting and well-maintained traveler, whose portable battery of pills, mousses, sprays, perfumes, paints, and potions has traditionally received short shrift when it comes to an adequate staging ground. There are some hotels that specialize in evoking an imaginary "country house" bathroom, the sort of place nabobs on the Grand Tour might have encountered if flush toilets had been widely known at the time. Or else ask Anthony Lee, the house manager of the seductively archaic Connaught Hotel in London (currently undergoing a discreet, and vaguely schizophrenic, rehabilitation: jackets are still required in the dining room, but there's a new high-tech fitness club)." In a kind of innkeepers' version of trickle-down economics, expectations of the high-end leisure traveler are thought to exert a subtle influence on the trade as a whole.

"The design briefs have tended to be pretty generic," Calvin Tsao tells me.At Le Royal in Phnom Penh, reopened in 1997, suites named for visiting dignitaries of the French colonial period are equipped with bathrooms—fog-free heated mirrors, vast claw-footed tubs, miraculously effective plumbing—that would have stunned even a practiced sybarite like André Malraux, never mind a traveler alert to the fact that most Cambodians bathe and relieve themselves in open waterways. "They're somewhat small," Tsao remarks tactfully of spaces that call to mind the sardine-can lavatories on airplanes, minus the diaper-changing shelf and the scary vacuum flush that threatens to pull the hair off your head. "One sink or two?A bidet?The issues you're considering are how to deploy horizontal surface. "So we created a panel next to the mirror for tissues, a makeup light, a small TV, and the outlets, and then we tried to organize things so that you know it's all there. Rather than being considered pods for sanitation and evacuation, hotel bathrooms, Balazs says, are now "theaters of operations. Or, rather, the lines between business and pleasure are less clearly drawn. There is, of course, the neo-ethnic instant heating water faucet bathroom—carved wood stools, tribal shields, awkward basins, and always, it seems, some tortured method for hanging up towels. There are others, replete with thatch or driftwood or rope ladder details, that seek to evoke lodgings for the high-end castaway in an uncaring world." At the Tribeca Grand Hotel in Manhattan, the space allotted Tsao & McKown was a scant 54 square feet