A subway washroom worth discovering

While my multiple jobs at Spacing keeps me almost entirely focused on public spaces outside, I do have a fascination with indoor spaces and how they are designed. In my eyes, a room’s layout is no different than laying out a page of a magazine: I need to find the appropriate space for specific objects, whether it’s photos and text or a couch and table. This would also explain my excitement for the upcoming Interior Design Show (which starts Thursday) down at the Direct Energy Centre on the CNE grounds.

So when I come across ideas that merge public spaces with interior design I get quite excited. This happened recently when I discovered a post from an excellent New York Times blogger Christoph Niemann. He’s an illustrator and author whose work has appeared in numerous hot-shot mags (New Yorker, Atlantic) and two children’s books, but his NYT posts are a fun way of story-telling that illustrators rarely get to explore in print.

His young kids are obsessed with the New York subway system so when his family recently relocated to Berlin and was renovating their new place, he wanted to experiment with tile art in the kids’ washroom. His boys were rewarded with a shower and tub decorated with the NYC subway map. Read the full post (scroll down to the bottom to see the kids’ washroom).

While it might appear that he is just spoiling his kids Arthur and Gustav, you have to read his amazingly endearing post about how truly obsessed the kids are with the subway system: they cry when they can’t get on the local line, they give better directions than their father, and this beauty of a story:

A chaperone on one of Arthur’s school trips told me something he overheard when all the kids were neatly lined up in rows of two. The girl holding Arthur’s hand asked him, “Have you heard of Peter Pan?” “No,” he replied, “have you heard of Metro North?”

photos and illustrations by Christoph Niemann