Today wasn’t out of the ordinary for our Design Team. Really.
I started my day a little earlier than usual so that I could meet with a client in the Oakland Hills and the manufacturer’s representative (“rep”) from Kohler. Thankfully it isn’t often that we need to make service calls with a Rep. No one wants to feel as though their toilet is a special case in how its function isn’t meeting their expectations. How would you respond, however, when there is a feature of a new “smart technology” that wasn’t advertised and keeps you up at night?
This is a beautiful, highly functioning, wall-mount toilet
There are many smart apps for devices that have learning patterns in order change color temperature so that we can retrain our brain to shut down and truly sleep at night. Insomnia apps. That’s right. Home technology, though, hasn’t quite caught up yet.
“Smart Homes” are a new wave and is here to stay. Integrated features you can control when away from home with the touch of an app and an internet connection increase our sense of security when the babysitter is hanging out with our kiddo, you’ve gone on a trip, a parent is borderline dementia and we want to ensure their forgotten teakettle doesn’t start a fire. That said, sometimes “smart” isn’t the same for everyone.
In the case of this beautiful, highly functioning, wall-mount toilet, there was one feature the marketing team neglected to mention in the documentation or show in photography. An intense LED blue light in the flush plate on the wall. While we knew about the actual “night light” on the bottom of the bowl with its soft glow that could be turned on/off by the user easily, this other light’s intensity glowed through the bathroom’s frosted glass door into the master bedroom, literally keeping our client awake.
As the one who recommended this toilet to our client, we took responsibility to work with Kohler, digging in with their tech team to see how this feature could be worked around without losing the more important features of having a personal cleansing bidet-seat system. In coming to a happy compromise solution through teamwork and patience, I went to their home today.
This is an actual photo of plastic wrap…on a toilet. We apologize.
We put plastic wrap on the bowl, closed the seat and attempted to test the bidet features. You read that correctly. We put plastic wrap on the bowl, closed the seat and attempted to test the bidet features. We then discovered that another intelligent feature is that someone must sit on the seat for it to function (This prevents children from squirting water around the bathroom.). So you can probably guess what I did this morning.
I sat, in my jeans, on a toilet covered in plastic wrap with our client and Rep laughing and hoping I wouldn’t need to go home for a change of clothes.
What did you do this morning?