Picture the last time you were in an unfamiliar building — a hotel, an office, a shopping centre — urgently looking for the bathroom. You probably wandered, checked a few corridors, asked someone. What if you never had to do that again?
Speaking on the Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki dropped what might be the most immediately useful piece of trivia in the entire episode.
“If I ever want to find the bathroom in a part of a building,” he told host Tiffany Dunk, “I go — okay, elevator, where are they? In that direction.”
The logic is architectural, not accidental. Both elevators and bathrooms require large, dedicated vertical shafts running the full height of a building — lifts for the mechanism and cables, bathrooms for the plumbing stacks that carry water and waste between floors. Building that infrastructure is expensive. Running two separate sets of shafts across a floor plan is dramatically more so.
The economical solution, adopted almost universally in commercial architecture, is to cluster both systems together in a central service core. Which is why, in virtually every multi-storey building you will ever enter, the bathrooms are right next to the lifts.
“If I ever want to find the bathroom in a part of a building, I go — okay, elevator, where are they? In that direction.”
“Most people don’t know that,” Dr Karl noted — with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has been deploying this knowledge for years.
He’s right. It’s the kind of fact that sits in plain sight, invisible until someone names it. And the moment it’s named, it becomes impossible to unsee. Every hotel corridor, every office floor, every department store: lifts, then bathrooms, almost without exception.
File it away. You’ll use it sooner than you think.
Watch the episode now:
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