Take the plunge
Elisabeth Luard’s recipe for the perfect bath
The perfect bath
Ican’t remember the exact moment I discovered that true happiness is to be found in up-to-the-chin immersion.
It has to be in water of precisely the right temperature, enhanced by the combination of Badedas or Epsom salts – if you can’t get hold of distilled essence of Bulgarian roses, gathered at dawn on the Shipka Pass.
It was certainly after my four children grew up and left home. In the bath, I was a captive audience for everything they’d been wanting to say all day. The result is a subliminal taste for Wiberg’s Pine Essence in January, Penhaligon’s Bluebell in March and Floris’s Lily of the Valley in April that’ll never leave them for the rest of their lives. The same was true for me. ‘Run me a bath, darling!’ my adored grandmother said, over a whirlpool of discarded crepe de Chine and Brussels lace.
This was a licence to experiment with the contents of her bathroom cupboard: an Aladdin’s cave of potions, unguents and essences in glass-stoppered bottles.
A belle from Baltimore, my mother’s mother was rich, spoilt and glamorous to the tips of her manicured fingernails. An orphaned tobacco heiress, educated in a convent, she married at 14 to escape the nuns. She was everything I hoped to be when I grew up. Life didn’t turn out that way, but I cleave to her sybaritic tastes.
In winter, the morning blend might have been mimosa and tuberose. Spring could be violet and primrose. In summer, it was rose and honeysuckle.
Evening baths were never experimental but perfumed to match her scent. In perfume – as with her wardrobe and dining table – her choices weren’t conventional.
Her favourite blend was Guerlain’s Mitsouku, with a measure of L’heure Bleu added by the drop into a miniature, cut-glass decanter.
When I perfected it, life was all sunshine and nightingales singing in Berkeley Square.
My bath habit is expensive. My bathroom shelf is stacked with luxurious, fragranced oils and perfumed salts. On an extravagancescale of one to ten, I’m a nine.
These are products for pleasure. Cleanliness, while desirable, requires power-showers, exfoliating mittens and soap-on-a-rope – or (never again) a rub-down in a Moroccan hammam by a female pugilist with a scrubbing brush made out of chainmail.
Misunderstandings arise over age-appropriate bathing-facilities – particularly for those of us of an age to receive our coronavirus jab in the second wave.
We all have our moments of truth. Mine came when I accepted – with deplorably bad grace – my children’s suggestion. They said the time had come for their mother to downsize from a sprawling fivebedroom farmhouse in the wilds of Wales to a one-person open-plan apartment in a converted soapfactory in west London.
There was mention of walk-in baths, non-slip shower trays, panic-buttons and grab-handles. I, accustomed to the full five-foot-six Edwardian bathtub, said, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’
Time’s chariot and all that, but I’m still gathering rosebuds while I may. Metaphorically.
The new apartment had everything – touch-sensitive hot-plates, built-in microwave, underfloor heating – except a bath. Millennials, the building’s target tenants, take showers.
I took a tape-measure and made my own plans. What was a grimly utilitarian, walk-in shower has been replaced by a one-person tub, deep rather than long, with built-in seat and arm-rests of the kind installed by Japanese billionaires on the terrace with a view of Mount Fuji at cherry-blossom time.
A pair of movable wooden steps allows me a Venus-like ascent, while strategically-placed grab-handles (the ones I swore against) prevent an undignified descent.
When it comes to in-bath atmosphere, candlelight doesn’t do. What’s needed is proper, overhead lighting, with which reading is not only possible but pleasurable.
Optimal snacks are watermelon, papaya and strawberries – but absolutely no biscuits, cake or anything that produces crumbs.
As for liquid refreshment, my current preference is for Campari with orange juice, ice and fizz, or the occasional gin-and-tonic if the cocktail cabinet runs to it. My Baltimore grandmother, a friend of Wallis Simpson, used to mix herself a mean Manhattan.
I’ve painted Moorish tiles on the splashback. I’m planning a trompe l’oeil of Provence lavender-fields or a Greek olive grove. Or somewhere – anywhere – where a person can spend an hour or two, undisturbed in idyllic happiness, while reading the Sunday papers, an un-improving novel or the latest most-brilliantever Oldie.
Or, for that matter, telephoning friends, chatting about work or watching The Crown on the laptop – particularly the bit with Princess Margaret misbehaving on Mustique.
It’s easy when you have the perfect formula.
Just lie back – or sit up – close your eyes and luxuriate.