Skinny-Dipping in the City
The outdoor shower on the 21st-floor terrace of Robby Browne's Manhattan apartment has a particularly sought-after view. "Who wouldn't want to shower looking at Central Park?" he said.
URBANITES: Consider the real estate luxuries that have consumed your thoughts, occupied your daydreams, perhaps even encroached upon your bank accounts, from the relatively modest (your own washer and dryer) to the truly extravagant (your own pool on the roof).
There is one that may not have occurred to you. The outdoor shower, that staple of summers by the lake or the sea, offers a mix of the rustic (a simple wooden stall) and the pristine (the glorious outdoors), even in the context of the city. It allows you to slip away, reveling in the combination of hot water and cool air on a spring morning, or the converse on a summer afternoon. Provided you’re not self-conscious, that is.
Mike Bennett, 51, is one of the true believers, willing to doff the swimsuit and bathe outside when the weather is warm. Yes, in the nude, in the city, where neighbors are inches, not acres, away.
On warm-weather mornings, Mr. Bennett, a contractor, grabs a cup of coffee, wraps a towel around his waist and climbs a flight of stairs to the roof deck he shares with the other residents of his building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There, amid the lavender and lounge chairs, he takes his shower, scrubbing and shaving five stories up.
“You can hear New York waking up,” he said. “The kids going to school. The hipsters off to work. The birds are doing their thing.”
Similarly, Tim Flint’s shower, in the walled yard of his home in the Hollywood Hills, offers “the pleasure of being naked outside and being in the sunshine,” he said.
A software consultant, Mr. Flint, 50, moved to Los Angeles from Chicago about six years ago. Initially he assumed he would use the outdoor shower only to rinse off after a dip in the swimming pool. But he is now among the converted.
“Being in the shower is pretty pleasurable as it is,” he said. “But being able to do it outside with the breeze, and the plantings around — you’re not in a dark, damp space."
Unlike most urban amenities, the outdoor shower doesn’t have to be expensive. Of course, it does require a certain amount of outdoor space, by no means a given in the city. But the materials may be as humble as you please. (The large convex mirror that hangs in Mr. Bennett’s shower was salvaged from a Dumpster.) And the structure itself is not difficult to build, though it should be noted that said structure may not necessarily be legal, depending on local building codes.
What is essential, though, is a certain level of comfort with public nudity. Privacy is at a premium in an urban environment; even if your neighbors can’t quite see you slipping in and out of the stall, there are all those planes coming into La Guardia.
Robby Browne, however, is able to enter the outdoor shower at his Central Park West apartment without much risk of detection, since it’s right off the master bedroom, though he pointed out that there are hundreds of windows in the neighboring towers that peer down on his 21st-floor terrace.
But that’s just on one side. The other side faces the park. And, as Mr. Browne, a broker with the Corcoran Group, said, “Who wouldn’t want to shower looking at Central Park?"
Enclosed on all sides and draped with fragrant honeysuckle, the wooden stall all but obscures him from view. He is able to see the sky through the lattice roof, and a small cutout in the wood serves as a window onto the park. From his spot under the shower head, he looks out across the trees to the Sherry-Netherland and the Pierre hotels on the East Side.
“I would feel self-conscious getting into a hot tub on my terrace,” he said. “But there is something very liberating about being in the shower.”
Susan Winton, an artist and teacher, adores the outdoor shower at the home she shares with her husband in Atlanta. So much so, she said, that “I’ve even been known to put a shower cap on so my hair doesn’t get wet if I use it in the rain.”
But five years ago, when she first starting showering outdoors, she felt conspicuous. “I used to look around and see who might have a view,” she said. “A traffic copter flies over you, and you wonder.”
On warm mornings, Mike Bennett takes his coffee up a flight of stairs to the roof deck of his building in Brooklyn, where he gets into the shower.
Ms. Winton, 71, has also had a few close calls with gardeners at the neighbors’ homes: “I’ll have just come out of the shower and they’ll come barreling out with their leaf blowers.”
Where prying eyes don’t go, however, wildlife sometimes does.
A squirrel perched on a nearby tree stared at Angie Marshall, 32, one day while she was using the clever indoor-outdoor shower in the house she and her husband recently built in Austin, Tex. It was especially strange, she said, “because squirrels don’t really sit still for that long.” The squirrel, she assumes, was transfixed by the water.
And Mr. Flint, in Los Angeles, believes there may be a skunk living under the cabana beside his shower. “I’ve seen him at night, out prowling around,” he said. “I’m just waiting for him to come out when my hair is all wet.”
But most often the intrusion of nature, particularly in an urban environment, is what makes the experience, suffusing it with a sort of “weird magic,” said Flora Grubb, 37, the landscape designer and owner of the enormous cult nursery Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco. “Even though you’re surrounded by people, you can’t see it.”
Working with the architect Seth Boor, a longtime friend, Ms. Grubb and her husband, Kevin Smith, a builder and artist, added an outdoor bathtub to the walled patio of a small cottage they recently sold, behind their house in the Mission district. “I’m obsessed with outdoor bathing,” Ms. Grubb said. “Being in hot water outside is one way to be outside at night without being cold.” (And San Francisco, she said, “is always just cold. And then it’s a little bit colder.”)
Made of poured concrete, the tub was shorter than the typical one you’d find in a bathroom, but far deeper, in the vein of a Japanese soaking tub. Even so, it was not a hot tub (which Ms. Grubb deems “kind of gross”), and there were no chemicals, no jets.
Before she and Mr. Smith sold the cottage, they used the tub whenever they could, she said, which was just about every evening. The main thing that struck her, she said, was “the incredible pleasure of being able to look up and see the sky and nothing else,” she said, “despite the fact that you are hemmed in on all sides.”
Like many of the couple’s friends, Mr. Boor also gave the tub a try. It was the first outdoor tub he ever designed, and he is now building one at his own home nearby. “You’re warm and vulnerable, but hearing all the sounds of the city around you,” he said. “You just hear and sense everything, but you’re in your own little private space.”
But the sweetest pleasure of bathing outdoors may be the attendant feeling, he said, that “you’re getting away with something.”
Copyright © 2012 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Robert Wright/The New York Times.
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