"It was designed by an architect," said the proprietor mournfully. This was at The Hermitage at Marananga in the Barossa Valley, and he was referring to the location of the room's light switch - not next to the door but at the other end of the room, behind a curtain - but he could as well have been referring to the bathroom in the supposedly accessible unit. It just wasn't functional. Indeed, as soon as it was clear that I wasn't exactly confined to a wheelchair we were moved to an ordinary unit - "We thought you'd prefer to have a double bed, besides..." I cannot recommend The Hermitage too highly.
It isn't only architects, of course. It's builders and motel proprietors and people who design standards and absolutely everybody. Pause while I breathe deeply and lower my blood pressure....
Some time ago the Ashbys went on a driving holiday, eating and drinking our way around South Australia. As it so happens we've never really been on a real driving holiday before, our normal practice being to go straight to one place and stay there. This time we got all sorts of brochures and guides and mapped out our route. Novices that we were, wherever possible we booked the disabled room, thinking that this would make life easier.
As it happened, the best bathroom experience of the whole trip had to be the place in the Adelaide Hills, which did not have disabled room. It was a mock Tuscan villa originally built by an eccentric and probably oversexed tycoon. It is now, um, what you might call a dirty weekender. Well, actually, an extremely clean weekender.
The bathroom was just enormous, bigger than the bedroom. The toilet was a bit claustrophobic, but at least was in its own little room for a change. It had a spa with a magnificent view, two washbasins and all that goes with them, mirrors everywhere, heated towel rails and, wait for it, a shower with two of everything. The only thing missing was a bidet, but I suppose the original owner was an Australian after all.
I should have known from our experience of Fiji - where we always stay in an ordinary room - that booking disabled rooms was a mistake. Unless you are really very seriously limited in your mobility, you will manage better in an ordinary room (even, I venture to suggest, if you are travelling alone).
Stop and think for a moment about what people do in bathrooms. There's the toilet of course. And there's the shower; apart from 5 star hotels built to international designs, Australian hotels and motels always have showers rather than the baths that seem to be the rule overseas.
Well, so disabled bathrooms always have toilets and showers. They always have a washbasin as well. You can have a shower (though there may be nowhere to put the soap) and you can go to the toilet (though you may not be able to reach the toilet paper) and you can wash your hands (though there may be no rail for a hand towel). But what else might you want to do in the bathroom?
You might want to shave, especially if you are a man. This usually requires a power point. Of course you might prefer the low-tech approach, in which case you need a surface on which to put your brush and other paraphernalia. People of either sex applying makeup and drying and styling their hair have similar requirements, as well as a mirror at a suitable height for somebody sitting down.
There is no guarantee that any or all of these features, standard in any ordinary motel room, will be found in a disabled room. We nearly awarded the wooden spoon to the place which had a power point but a non-functioning hot-water tap - "It's the calcification - nobody ever uses this room." However, it was only poor maintenance and they certainly knew how to cook fish, so the judge's decision goes to the fairly expensive serviced apartments in Adelaide that got just about everything wrong, starting with the incredibly narrow (by any standards) parking spaces, moving up the ramp to the step at the front door which led to the completely unmodified kitchen and past the normal height power switches into the bedroom where a king-size bed took up so much space that it could not be approached by a wheelchair.
The only mirror in the place was a full length one in the bathroom. No, I tell a lie - there was another on, mounted far too high above the wash basin. There was a power point in the bathroom, but it was for the washing machine on the other side of the room, about two metres off the floor and obviously not meant to be unplugged. There was no decent-sized shelf or vanity and you had to hang the hand towel on the toilet grab rail. It goes without saying that although there was no step to the shower the floor was perfectly level, with the usual consequences of water sloshing everywhere (you just have to get more towels and put them on the floor). There was no soap-holder in the shower and the built-in seat was uncomfortably high off the ground, not to mention uncomfortably hard on the bum as it was made of wooden slats.
I actually wrote to the management pointing out these deficiencies. In their reply they claimed that the place had been approved by the South Australian Division of ACROD, which coincidentally had its office next door, up a flight of stairs.
Really, it's all due to a lack of imagination. It seems that the people who design these rooms fail to appreciate that the standards are only a guide to basic minimum features, not a complete solution. If only they would make the effort to think about what it would be like to use the facilities (or lack of them) themselves.
It's quite depressing thinking of all those access committees exerting all that pressure for all those years, only to result in the almost universal provision of substandard bathrooms that would simply not be tolerated by ablebodied guests. We still have a long way to go. In the meantime, whenever I have a long, or even short, way to go I always book a regular room.
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