Bidets: A Modern Upgrade for Bathroom Remodels
For hundreds of years, European cultures have embraced the bidet—a basin designed to wash one’s private areas after using the restroom. And while American tastes have been slow to catch up, the use of bidets and other high-tech bathroom accessories has become far more commonplace in the U.S. and other cultures, including in Asia.
A New Remodeling Market Segment Emerges
When it comes to renovation and remodeling, the notion of the household bathroom as a “sanctuary” has become quite common—particularly so in the last few years.
Sales tell the story, and the bidet category achieved unprecedented year-over-year revenue growth from 2019 to 2020 at our firm alone. Bidets represent a substantial business opportunity for remodelers, and as the country emerges from the pandemic, we continue to observe only increased demand.
Consumer awareness of bidets is being driven in part by retail outlets. Popular bidet products have started to appear on the shelves of mainstream department stores and home centers.
Bidet Seats v. Bidet Toilets
Reasons behind the widespread adoption of bidets, as well as a new generation of “smart toilets,” include greater comfort, improved hygiene, and environmental benefits.
Today’s smart toilets and bidet toilet seat attachments are a far cry from the peculiar contraption one might have seen in a hotel room while on a years-ago European vacation. Modernized for American homes, bidet attachments, seats, and toilets enhance a bathroom with minimal work and are a snap for remodelers to install.
Sleekly styled and with a modern design, the contemporary bidet takes two common forms, either as a toilet seat or as a complete smart toilet that integrates advanced comfort and convenience features. High-tech in the extreme, they can often include remote controls, adjustable user settings, and intelligent body sensors.
Bidet seats—a fast and easy retrofit to almost any home toilet – offer a surprisingly robust feature set that brings remarkable comfort to the bathroom experience. Incorporating simple plumbing connections, bidet seats replace the existing toilet seat and offer wash/dry functions, as well as more advanced features like water pressure, nozzle oscillation, and temperature control, for ultimate cleanliness.
Bidet toilets, as the name implies, are integrated, all-in-one bidet-and-toilet combinations that combine the function of a toilet with the wide range of features found as part of an electric bidet. As total replacements for the home toilet, these units often integrate luxe touches like auto-flush, massage washers, self-rising lids, UV sterilization, and personalized user profiles.
Not only do both kinds of bidet help enhance one’s personal hygiene through touch-free cleaning, but they also assist in helping the environment. In addition to being personal wellness solutions, bidets limit the need to use excessive amounts of toilet paper and help consumers achieve water savings through fewer flushes.
