A year ago, Ben Jones asked his wife if he could have a urinal.
“No way. Absolutely not,” Gina Jones told her husband.
The 40-year-old San Antonio-area magazine publisher kept after her. The fixture would be perfect in the first-floor bathroom of their new house, he said, near the door to the deck.
Jones then went with his wife to a plumbing supply store where they were shown an American Standard catalog. The showroom manager pointed out the $91 Maybrook model and noted that it would help keep the bathroom floor dry, particularly when the Joneses entertain.
“OK,” Ms. Jones, an attorney, finally told her husband, after all the cajoling, “but you’re going to clean it.”
The device was unveiled at a party over the Memorial Day weekend. Mr. Jones recalls the reaction from his high-fiving buddies: “You got a urinal. Awesome! How’d you talk your wife into that?”
After their long confinement to public restrooms, urinals are creeping into American homes. A big reason: big houses, with spacious new bathrooms.
Roughly 325,000 urinals are manufactured every year in the U.S., and almost all of them still go into offices, stadiums and other commercial spaces. Nobody tracks residential installations, but officials at two big makers of toilets, American Standard Cos. and Kohler Co., say they’re hearing about more of them. Atlanta plumber Tom Ward says that in his first 19 years in the business he didn’t install a single home urinal. In the past seven years, he has installed 10. Designers say they are incorporating more urinals into bathroom plans. They are particularly appreciated in homes with young boys.
U.S. urinal makers have long recognized that their models lacked a certain domesticity. In 1888, J.L. Mott Iron Works in New York addressed the issue by offering a porcelain-lined device that could be folded up into the wall like a Murphy bed. “It has been our desire for many years,” the company wrote in its catalog, “to get a urinal … that would be adapted for private use in all rooms set aside for gentlemen’s use, such as billiard and smoking rooms, private offices, etc.”
Urinals are a great project for the serious handyman. Outside Elk Rapids, Mich., John Shepherd (no relation to Mike Shepherd) wanted something unique for his basement – near the 10-seat home theater he built last year. The 52-year-old Web designer and pizza-parlor cook ordered a urinal from a plumbing supply house for $210. Behind a wall, he rigged up a 15-gallon water-pressure tank. (Water pressure can sometimes be an issue at existing-home installations.)
He installed an electric solenoid valve, wiring that into a used Bendix switchbox he had long ago purchased for $6.95 at a military surplus store. He then bolted the box above and to the right of the urinal. Users who want a quick flush push a button. Those who want a continuous flush flick up on a toggle. Two weeks ago, Shepherd installed another urinal upstairs. “They’re really handy,” he says.
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