Chronicle No. 77 · Innovations

Seventy Bathrooms: The Savoy's Impossible Arithmetic

A theatre impresario built a London hotel with more baths than the rest of the city combined, then hired Ritz and Escoffier to run it.

Richard D'Oyly Carte made his fortune staging Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1881 he built the Savoy Theatre — the first public building in the world lit throughout by electric light — and put the profits from the operas into the hotel he raised beside it.

The Savoy opened on 6 August 1889, and its specification read like a misprint:

• Electric light throughout
• Electric lifts, which the staff called ascending rooms
• Constant hot and cold running water in the rooms
• Seventy bathrooms

The last figure was the scandal. A large London hotel of the period might offer four bathrooms for several hundred rooms; guests were expected to wash from a jug. The builder is supposed to have asked D'Oyly Carte whether he was expecting amphibian guests.

He then hired the two best people in Europe: César Ritz to manage the hotel and Auguste Escoffier to run the kitchen. The Savoy restaurant became the room in which London dined in public, and did a great deal to make it ordinary for a woman to eat in a restaurant at all.

The partnership ended badly. In 1898 both men were dismissed after an investigation into missing stock and payments from suppliers. Neither was finished: within a few years they had built the Ritz.

Lesson: The Savoy sold plumbing as luxury before anyone had asked for it. Standards move when an operator builds ahead of demand and makes the old normal look shabby.