Bathroom throne offers golden opportunity

Guggenheim Museum exhibits 18-karat toilet

If you’re a fan of those celebrity homes reality-TV series, it’s likely entered your mind that a rich star’s mansion might include a bathroom or two (or more) featuring a bedazzling gold-plated toilet.

An odd fantasy, perhaps. But New York’s Guggenheim Museum already has your expensive throne visions covered, so to speak.

According to the BBC and the museum’s website, Italian artist and sculptor Maurizio Cattelan conjured up an 18-karat solid-gold toilet and installed it in a small restroom two-thirds of the way up the museum’s spiral staircase, replacing one of the regular Kohler toilets. The fully functional lavatory, which Cattelan has titled America, is available for Guggenheim visitors to use with the price of admission. There’s also a guard who stands outside the facility’s door to answer any questions that visitors have.

The museum has explained the piece is “ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity.”

Cattelan’s exhibit, which opened Sept. 16, is aimed at “making available to the public an extravagant luxury product seemingly intended for the one per cent,” the museum explains.

If money is no object, House Beautiful says one of these extravagant porcelain bowls can be snatched up — whether it’s a US$94,480 Swarovski-Studded Toilet or, for a cool US$5 million, a Hang Fung Gold Toilet (if gold is a favourite colour).