Charlie Sawyer
Published December 2, 2025 7:00am
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If I see one more beaded curtain I’m going to scream (Picture: Shutterstock/Getty)
Newsflash: if using your establishment’s loo means people can either see my knees or hear me breathing — or worse — I’d rather wet myself.
I recently walked in to the hotel room I’d be sharing with my friends for our annual girls trip, and was immediately confronted with the awful realisation that for an entire week I would be emptying my bowels in a bathroom with a razor thin glass door.
It begs the serious question: what happened to proper bathroom doors?
And by proper, I mean a tall, sturdy piece of wood or metal — not a papier-mâché curtain.
In my quest to answer this very query, I stumbled across a growing online movement: the #bringbackdoors campaign. It turns out, there’s lots of us out there who want to pee in peace.
Hotels, I beg you, put doors back on toilets
On 25 November, researcher John Scott-Railton posted on X: ‘Hotel toilet privacy is disappearing.’ Within minutes, replies from like-minded people came flooding in.
One user, Mark Valorian, wrote: ‘You don’t even know the half of it. The W in London has a shower that opens up to the main room. The toilet is another room that opens up to the main living area. So when you get out of the shower, you’re just in the bedroom/kitchen. No place to get dressed.’
While Tom Fowler added: ‘It’s neither hip nor happening to watch the fragile outline of your partner sh*tting.’
This conversation ultimately prompted John to drop the link to a website he’d come across, simply called: Bring Back Doors.
Created by freelance digital marketer, Sadie, the website is solely dedicated to identifying hotel rooms across the world that have proper, closing, opaque, bathroom doors.
@bring_back_doorsHotel Name ⬇️ Hilton Birmingham Metropole Birmingham, UK This one is such a crazy lay out. Like first you could totally fit a door in this space. And second! Why are the toilets looking out into the hallway??? Like I guess it’s good that you don’t have a mirror (at least) across from the toilet. But the threat of randos in the hallway seeing you? Horrible. Anyways, if you find your hotels from my pre-approved list on bringbackdoors.com you can save any worry of this happening to you. Hotel submitted by [redacted]. Send me a DM or drop a photo, the name, and location in the comments for me to feature! #badhotel #hotel #travel #bathroom #fyp Bad hotel design | hotel design | crazy hotels | bathroom doors | hotel doors | hotel designers | travel stories | travel nightmare | bad design | hotel memories
♬ original sound – Bring Back Bathroom Doors
Known to the public only by her first name, Sadie is kind of like Batman – that is, if Batman cared exclusively about toilet privacy as opposed to the safety of Gotham City. She chooses to keep a relatively low profile online, opting not to share her name or location with Metro.
Her platform though is meticulously detailed. With both a ‘Hotels With Bathroom Doors’ and ‘Hotels With No Bathroom Doors’ section, visitors can peruse different cities across the world and plan their trip accordingly.
She’s even created complimentary social media channels, to add that all-so-important visual element.
Speaking with Metro, Sadie explained: ‘I travel a lot with friends and family and I got tired of having to leave the room or sit in specific places in the hotel room when someone was in the bathroom.’
Comment now Have you experienced a loo without a door? Share your stories in the comments below Comment Now‘I also realised from a series of viral videos and their comments on TikTok and Instagram that this problem was widespread and was bothering lots of people.’
The most invasive bathroom Sadie’s ever personally experienced? ‘The Holmes Hotel in London was almost the worst for me,’ she shares.
‘But the Boutique Hotel Vivenda Miranda in Lagos, Portugal takes the crown.
‘This hotel had no bathroom door, and the wall, that should have provided some privacy, had a window.
@bring_back_doorsHotel Name👇 Holmes Hotel, London, England I’m done arriving at hotels to find that the room doesn’t have a bathroom door. So I built a website that can quickly tell you if the hotel you’re staying at has a bathroom door or not. 🔗 in bio to find out. If you’ve stayed at a hotel with no bathroom door, send me a DM (with a photo if possible) and I will add it to the 50+ doorless hotels I’ve already found. The days of the hotel industry forcing tourists to stay in rooms that don’t have bathroom doors are over. From now on, travelers will have ALL relevant information when booking a hotel room. #hotel #bathroom #travel Where have bathroom doors gone | why do hotels not have doors | hotel bathroom doors | no bathroom doors | bathroom doors | bathroom design | hotel design | bad hotel design
♬ original sound – Bring Back Bathroom Doors
‘It was a ground floor room looking out to the hotel gardens, and you could see from the outside into the shower.’
And the no-doors trend has extended beyond hotels. Gloria, a popular Italian restaurant in London, was recently called out for it’s ‘strange toilets.’
As it turns out, the bathrooms at Gloria include cubicles with one-way glass doors. Meaning while you’re sat on the toilet doing your business, your view is of other customers washing their hands. Irrespective of the fact that they can’t see you, it’s enough to give you stage fright.
Meanwhile, Indian restaurant Dishoom has faced similar criticism for its wooden-slatted doors. There chance of making eye-contact while sat on the throne is just a little too high.
Gloria in London has been called out for it’s invasive toilets (Credits: Getty Images)
Why are so many places ditching toilet doors?
In Sadie’s opinion, the lack of proper bathroom doors all comes down to one thing: money.
‘It’s always the money,’ she says. ‘Hotels have limited space to work with, but want rooms that feel larger and can be rented for higher prices.
‘Removing the bathroom walls gives them more space to trick consumers’ minds into thinking they have a larger room.’
Metro spoke with interiors expert, Deirdre McGettrick, founder of ufurnish.com, who offered up a different theory.
While she agreed that the no door movement was inconvenient, sharing her own nightmarish experience of being confronted by a loo with no partition during a holiday in Ibiza, Deirdre disagreed with Sadie that establishment’s were jumping on this trend solely due to costs.
‘People are wanting to push boundaries and win awards,’ Deirdre shared. ‘They want to do something different and sometimes that means doing something that doesn’t work.
‘It’s about design over function,’ she says. ‘They’re trying to be funky, and trendy — they want to stand out.’
Plus, Deirdre pointed out the fact that a number of the hotels going doorless aren’t exactly budget hotels.
‘When you think about it, there’s a lot of glass involved in these no-door designs, which means a lot of cleaning and this can lead to cost implications on things such as housekeeping.’
Sadie's ideal bathroom layout
The queen of proper bathroom doors herself told Metro exactly what she wants to see out of a bathroom.
‘It’s simple,’ she says. ‘A bathroom door that touches the ceiling, floor, and both walls.
‘No surprise windows at any place in the bathroom. A non-rainfall shower head and counter space for me to put things. A hook by the sink for hand towels, and at least one hook per potential guest in the room (two hooks if the room just has a single queen bed, four hooks if the room has two queen beds).’
She added: ‘Essentially, my dream hotel bathroom is the type that would have been standard in hotels 10-15 years ago.’
I don’t want to see my colleague on the loo
Metro also spoke with Kendra Gaylord, a content creator who regularly talks about architecture in pop culture, and how the two worlds collide.
Kendra’s video, titled ‘What happened to bathroom doors,’ has almost reached 100,000 views.
Kendra told Metro: ‘I’ve noticed that the footprint [in hotel rooms] seems to be shrinking and privacy was minimal.’
‘When I saw Sadie’s videos on TikTok it reminded me of the Dream Downtown Hotel I’d stayed at with my partner in New York City 10 years ago.
‘I went to the bathroom and on the sliding door I found a 3 inch hole where a doorknob should be. When you look online you have to search through 100s of user photos to see the door situation.’
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Shortly after posting her video, Kendra noted that she was taken aback by the different reactions in the comments section.
‘Comments include horror stories of work conferences where people had to share these doorless hotels with coworkers. There were stories of people getting sick and having everyone in the room see. Or people woken up anytime someone uses the bathroom because the glass bathroom walls means light pours across the room.’
Sadie noted that in the month since she launched the website, over 60,000 people have visited the platform to check for hotels.
She noted, ‘I currently have almost 300 hotels added to the website and I’m adding more every single day.’
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