Now that the steam has mostly settled into the grout of the tiles, the silence in the Aachen bathroom feels less like luxury and more like a bill being calculated in real-time. Elena stands there, her hand hovering over the cold chrome of the tap. It is a Sunday in -the kind of damp, grey afternoon that practically demands a long, hot soak. She had planned this for . She had even bought a specific salt, something with eucalyptus and the promise of a “spa-like experience” that cost her exactly 3 euros at the chemist.
The water had been running for about when she looked at the energy meter. Or perhaps it wasn’t the meter, but the sheer physical reality of the tub. It is a massive, white, ceramic footprint. It occupies nearly 33 percent of her total bathroom floor space. As she watched the water swirl around the drain, she realized she didn’t actually want to sit in a tepid pool of her own thoughts. She wanted to be clean, and she wanted to be warm, and the bathtub was a particularly inefficient way to achieve either.
She turned off the tap, pulled the plug, and stepped into the small, cramped corner where her shower head hung like an afterthought. The tub remained, as it does for of the year, as the world’s most expensive storage unit for three half-empty bottles of purple shampoo and a rubber duck that has been there since she moved in .
The Cultural Hangover of the Wannenbad
We are living in a cultural hangover. For decades, the German bathroom was designed around the “Wannenbad”-the Saturday night ritual where the whole family would take turns in the same water. It was a symbol of hygiene, of middle-class achievement, of having “arrived.” But the ritual is dead. In its place, we have a porcelain ghost that haunts our morning routines.
I tried to fix mine once. I’m a victim of the Pinterest-industrial complex. I saw a post about “upcycling” a dated bathtub into a miniature indoor garden. I spent scrubbing the limestone off the base and another 33 euros on specialized potting soil for succulents that supposedly thrived in humid environments.
It was a disaster. The drainage was a nightmare, the soil turned into a grey sludge, and my bathroom ended up smelling like a damp forest floor in a way that felt less “eco-retreat” and more “abandoned basement.” I ended up hauling 13 kilos of wet dirt out in buckets, feeling like a fool.
The contradiction is that I hate the tub, yet I felt a strange guilt when I thought about removing it. We’ve been conditioned to believe that a house without a tub is incomplete, a “half-bathroom,” an architectural failure.
Muhammad J.-C. and the Neglect Statistics
Muhammad J.-C., a building code inspector I met while trying to navigate the labyrinthine permits for a minor kitchen renovation, confirmed this obsession. He has inspected more than 553 apartments in his career. He told me, with a weary shrug of his shoulders, that 493 of those apartments had bathtubs that showed clear signs of “chronic neglect.”
Apartments Inspected
553
Bathtubs Showing Neglect
493
Building inspector data shows that nearly 9 out of 10 modern bathtubs are used primarily as storage rather than for bathing.
“People treat them like oversized shelves,” Muhammad J.-C. told me while tapping a digital measure against a particularly dusty tub rim. “They put their laundry baskets in them. They dry their hand-washed sweaters over them. I’ve even seen people keep their recycling bins in the tub.”
– Muhammad J.-C., Building Inspector
“But when they go to sell the apartment, they insist that the tub stays. They think the next person will be a ‘bath person.’ We are all living for a fictional future buyer who spends four hours a day soaking in bubbles, while we ourselves are tripping over the edge of the porcelain every time we want to brush our teeth.”
The Staggering Cost of Idle Space
It is a spatial tax. If you calculate the rent per square meter in a city like Aachen or Munich, that unused tub is costing you roughly 63 euros a month just to exist. Over of a mortgage, that is a staggering amount of money to pay for a basin that mostly just collects dust and the occasional spider.
€17,388
Paid over 23 years for 3m² of unused tub space
We tell ourselves that one day, we will be the kind of people who have the time and the mental stillness to spend submerged in water. We buy the oils, we buy the candles, we buy the bamboo trays to hold a book we won’t read because our hands are wet. But the reality of contemporary life is a shower before a commute. The tub is a monument to a lifestyle we no longer possess.
Reclaiming Your Actual Pulse
This is where the shift toward pragmatism becomes not just a design choice, but a mental health one. There is a profound relief in admitting that you are a “shower person.” When you stop trying to accommodate the ghost of a 1973 lifestyle, the bathroom suddenly opens up. You realize that you could have a walk-in shower the size of a small hallway, with enough room to actually move your arms without hitting a plastic curtain.
I remember talking to a representative from
about this very transition. They see it every day-the moment a homeowner finally gives themselves permission to rip out the useless basin. It’s almost an act of rebellion.
By focusing on high-quality shower enclosures and streamlined systems, you aren’t “downgrading”; you are finally aligning your environment with your actual pulse.
The Brutal Math of the 153-Liter Basin
The technical reality of the tub is also increasingly difficult to justify. To fill a standard tub, you need about 153 liters of water. To get that water to a comfortable 43 degrees Celsius requires a significant amount of energy, especially with the current price spikes.
A standard bath uses 30% more water and energy than a long, luxurious shower.
A high-efficiency shower uses about 9 liters per minute. Even if you take a luxurious shower, you are still using less than half the water and energy of the tub. The math is brutal, yet we ignore it because the bathtub is “standard.”
But what is “standard” anyway? Muhammad J.-C. once showed me a blueprint from a development. The bathrooms were tiny, barely 3 square meters, yet they squeezed a tub in there. The result was a room where you had to stand on the toilet to close the door. It was a triumph of tradition over physics. He laughed about it, but there was a sadness there. We sacrifice our physical comfort today for the sake of a tradition that was perfected by people who didn’t have high-speed internet or .
My Pinterest failure taught me one thing: you can’t force an object to be something it isn’t. A bathtub is not a garden, it is not a sofa, and for most of us, it is not a place of relaxation. It is a barrier. It’s a high wall you have to climb over every morning, a slippery surface that becomes a genuine hazard as you get older, and a giant bowl that requires constant cleaning despite never being used for its intended purpose.
I eventually gave up on the succulent garden. I hired a professional to help me rethink the space. We looked at the floor plan and realized that by removing the tub, we could fit a double vanity and a shower that actually felt like a room rather than a coffin. The transformation was 73 percent psychological. Suddenly, the bathroom didn’t feel like a chore. It felt like a tool-a well-oiled, efficient tool for living.
We often fear that by removing the tub, we are losing value. But value is not just about resale; it is about utility. What is the value of a room that makes you sigh with frustration every time you enter it? What is the value of 3 square meters of dead space?
We spend our lives trying to fit ourselves into boxes-the box of our career, the box of our social expectations, and quite literally, the porcelain box in our bathrooms. But your home should be a reflection of your reality, not a museum of “supposed-to-be.” If you haven’t taken a bath in , you aren’t a “bath person.” And that’s okay.
You don’t need a tub to be a person who values self-care. In fact, caring for yourself might mean finally getting rid of the things that just take up space and offer nothing in return.
In the end, Elena in Aachen didn’t take her bath. She finished her shower, dried off in , and felt remarkably better. She looked at the empty tub, still holding those three bottles of shampoo and the lonely rubber duck. She realized she wasn’t keeping the tub for her comfort; she was keeping it because she was afraid of what the bathroom would look like without it. It was a hole in her life that she had filled with ceramic.
The next morning, she called a contractor. She didn’t ask for a new tub. She asked for a space where she could breathe. And as she watched the old basin being hauled out-a heavy, awkward thing that took 3 men to carry-she didn’t feel a sense of loss. She felt 113 kilos lighter. Sometimes, the most expensive thing you own is the thing you don’t use, and the most valuable thing you can do is let it go.