A toilet like we know it did not exist around 1800: For country house residents, a toilet was still a table containing everything a lady needed to make herself beautiful. If she had to answer the call of nature, she used a chamber pot or -stool  which servants emptied into the country house’s own cesspool. To avoid overflow, hired laborers emptied the cesspool once a year. People bathed far less frequently than we do today. They pursued a different approach to look clean: Those who could afford it changed their linen frequently as a white shirt made its wearer appear neat and clean. Masters and mistresses needed a lot of clothes for this strategy to work  as the “great wash” took place only two or three times a year. This very laborious undertaking dragged on for several days and put the country house into a state of extraordinary activity. The mistress usually hired extra servants who assisted with the tedious washing, drying, and ironing. But these servants only took on the laundry of upstairs, those downstairs had to engage a washerwoman in the village.

Even though doing the laundry remained a cumbersome task, the end of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of new comforts. The toilet changed from being a table to a room and bit by bit, the water closet displaced the chamber pot. Accordingly, servants no longer crossed the corridors to empty a night’s worth of human waste into the cesspool. However, a spot needed to be found for the toilet and  owners faced costly considerations. Where could they install a bathroom?  How to get running water there? What about the effluents? Plumbers turned empty guest rooms or expendable storerooms into functional rather than fancy bathrooms and ran expensive pipes through old walls. Hermine and Kuno von Thannhause also had such ideas in mind when they added new comforts to their country house Thannhausen. In 1926, they had central heating and water pipes installed.