Indeed, French building codes require this separation. The location of French toilets is tied to a number of cultural issues, especially public vs. private space and concepts of clean vs. dirty.
Flushing the toilet, especially if someone forgets to close the lid, causes some particles to fly through the air and land everywhere. By keeping them separate, you ensure that stuff that's thrown into the air doesn't land on, for example, your towel or toothbrush.
However, in France and many other parts of the world, a "bathroom" is used to describe a room that doesn't necessarily contain a toilet. Typically contains a shower, basin and toiiet. May also include a tub in larger apartments. Contains four plumbing fixtures: Bathtub, shower, toilet, and sink.
A separate toilet room, sometimes known as a water closet, is an old design element that is popping up again in master bathrooms everywhere. What about a small separate room is appealing to so many?
Why? Because major plumbing codes in the U.S. use a public building's capacity to dictate how many restrooms should be built, and those codes specify that men and women's facilities should be separate. The codes even mandate a minimum number of toilets and urinals per sex.
Given the way Japanese homes are built, there are several reasons for this preference. Unlike many places in the world, even larger homes with 3-4 bedrooms will still only have one sink, one toilet, and one bathing area. By separating the spaces they can be used simultaneously by different people.
While not every country is governed by these rules, many site toilets still adopt this seat style for hygiene reasons. Split toilet seats offer more space so the user won't accidentally hit the seat with their genitals, and it also reduces the chance of splashing urine onto the front of the seat.
The phrase 'water closet' arose in England in the 1870s. Originally 'wash-down closet', it quickly evolved into the phrase water closet through common usage. Over time, it has simply become 'WC'.
To builders nowadays, a water closet refers to a room with just a toilet, although some companies, such as Richmond American Homes, will include water closets in the same category as a powder room or a half bath—a room with a toilet plus a sink.
Toilets tend to be next to bathtubs because both of them tend to be in a small room that is kept rather private from the rest of the house and because both of them need to have fairly substantial plumbing in order to operate correctly.
Les toilettes, les cabinets – the restroom, always plural in French.
Why are all the toilet seats missing in Italian public bathrooms? Seat-free toilets are seen as more hygienic because strangers aren't sharing the same toilet seat. Toilet seats are also often broken by patrons and are expensive and difficult to replace.
Most Italian public toilets don't have a toilet seat.
This has to do with maintenance. Since public toilets are often less than spotless, people often climb with their shoes on top of them, not to sit on a potentially dirty seat.
Some higher class hotels have European-style flush toilets, but it should be fairly obvious which are which. France – Contrary to popular belief, many places in France have toilets that you can actually safely use and you'll be able to flush the paper. This isn't the 1980s you know.
In British English, "bathroom" is a common term but is typically reserved for private rooms primarily used for bathing; a room without a bathtub or shower is more often known as a "WC", an abbreviation for water closet, "lavatory", or "loo". Other terms are also used, some as part of a regional dialect.
The Loo. Loo is an informal yet polite British term for toilet. The word “loo” has interesting origins and can be traced back to Medieval Europe, when chamber pots had to be emptied from bedroom windows onto the street below.
The bathroom is the “Badezimmer” in German and the “toilet” is the “Toilette”. Both words work but if you're at someone's home, it's more common to ask for the “Badezimmer” while in public you would directly ask for the “Toiletten”.
However, while one of the systems most definitely is a toilet for human wastage, the other serves a different purpose. The other "toilet" is in-fact a bidet. You have likely heard of bidet but may not have come across one in the UK, as they are not installed as standard in UK homes or even in most hotels.
The gap in the seat is designed to “allow women to wipe the perineal area after using the toilet without contacting the seat,” she tells Slate.
Arguably the most alarming feature of a Water Closet is the infamous Dutch toilet bowl. Dutch engineers have designed the bowl itself to contain a plateau set well above the normal water level.
American toilets are all about suction, they pull the waste down when the toilet is flushed, and then out into the “trap way”. The amount of suction required for this process means that the “trap way” needs to be narrow, and it's usually around five centimetres wide.