I give tours of a house with 43 bathrooms. A ten year old's question about the towels changed my own bathroom.

By Susan B.Asheville, North Carolina6 minute read

I give tours of the Biltmore for a living. If you don't know it, it's the largest private home in America. George Vanderbilt built it in the mountains of North Carolina and opened it on Christmas Eve, 1895, back when the Vanderbilts were the richest family this country had ever produced.

I walk people through that house eight times a day. After four years of it, I can tell you the thing that stops every single group in their tracks is not the paintings, and not the ceilings.

It's the bathrooms.

In 1895, most of America was still using an outhouse. Hauling water. Heating it on a stove. And this one family built a house with 43 bathrooms, at a time when most people had never seen a single one indoors.

Forty three. I say the number on every tour and I watch it land. People cannot process it. A private home with more bathrooms than most hotels.

And I used to say that number the same way everyone does. As a punchline. As proof that rich people are a little insane.

It started with a kid on one of my tours. Maybe ten years old. He looked into one of the bathrooms and asked me, dead serious,

Did rich people back then even have nice towels, or just gold everything?”

Everyone laughed. But I didn't actually know the answer. And it stuck with me the rest of the day.

So I looked it up

The towel as we know it, the kind covered in little loops, was still fairly new back then. Travelers brought looped cotton towels home from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1851 an English mill's version won a prize at the Great Exhibition in London. They were sold as Royal Turkish Towels, a name Queen Victoria approved. By the 1890s, a stack of heavy cotton Turkish towels was a real luxury.

What made them special was the loops. Every tiny loop pulls water off your skin and holds it. Good cotton, woven into lots of loops, is what makes a towel feel like something.

That's the part that got me. A towel isn't a thing you show off. It's a thing you feel, in private, every single day.

Then I picked up my own towel

I went home that night and did the thing you shouldn't do after work. I looked at my own bathroom like a tour guide.

My towel was from a big box store, maybe a year old. Thin. Rough. Bobbling at the edge. That faint grey tint even though it started out white. That scratchy feeling where you dry off as fast as you can just to be done with it.

A hundred and thirty years of progress, and the towel in my hands felt like an afterthought.

How did we go backwards?

Why most towels get worse every month

I spent the next few weeks reading everything I could find. Laundry forums. Towel threads. Hundreds of people describing my towel exactly. It comes down to three things.

“Once the softening chemicals are fully washed out, they are awful.”

A comment in a Reddit thread about towels

Does anyone still make them the right way?

Good hotels never let this slide, because a guest feels a bad towel in a single shower. It's why you stand in a nice hotel bathroom wrapped up and think, why doesn't mine feel like this?

So I wrote myself a list, the same way I write my tour notes.

Most towels I found checked one box. Plenty didn't even say what cotton they used. The one that checked all four was a small brand called Bioreiv: 100% long staple cotton, looped terry, 600 GSM, made to get softer and more absorbent over its first few washes.

See the Bioreiv towels and colors →

What happened next

I ordered a set. When it came, I pulled the first towel out and my hands knew right away. Heavy. Dense. A softness that seems to live inside the cotton instead of sitting on top of it.

I washed them first, like the tag says, then took a shower that night just to use one. Stepped out. Wrapped up. And I just stood there. Bare feet on the tile, steam in the air, in a bathroom that is the furthest thing from Biltmore you could imagine.

For the first time, it didn't feel like the worst room in my apartment.

Week 1

My old towels left fuzz on my black leggings every single time. These leave far less.

Week 2

My boyfriend came out of the shower and stopped in the doorway. “What are these towels.” Not a question. This is a man who wore the same hoodie until it fell apart.

Week 3

My mom visited. Used the bathroom. Came out, sat down and said, “Those towels.” Then she went quiet and a little teary. Forty years of rough towels, and she never knew they could feel like that. I ordered her a set that night.

Week 4

Fourth wash. They feel softer than the day they arrived.

What I say on tour now

I still stand in front of a group and say “43 bathrooms,” and everybody still laughs. I used to laugh too.

But I think that family understood something the rest of us forgot. The things that touch your skin every day matter more than the things people see. The house was for the photographs. The towels were for them.

You don't need 250 rooms. You just need what goes in the bathroom.

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“The Bioreiv towels are really soft and feel nice against my skin. They dry well and don’t leave that damp smell like some other towels do. I’ve noticed they still feel great after a few washes, which I really appreciate.”

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