Let me, for the benefit to  start by saying if I were to be labelled a “fanboy” of anything…Mercedes-Benz would be one I’d be close to being guilty of. Exotic cars in general, but Mercedes has a special pull for me…I’m not sure if it’s my German heritage crying out to me or just something about them…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but hey, they make some pretty cool cars. Anyway…disclaimer aside, here goes… (btw…I was here 2/23/2010)

This has literally gotta be one of the coolest bathrooms I’ve ever been in. If it were in a Honda or VW or Ford or Kia or any other car dealer (despite Honda’s near-stellar reputation, I’m not a fan…I like Ford trucks, their now-defunct Excursion, and they did probably the best job of any company of renewing the retro side of the pony car-era with the new Mustang…VW owns Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Bugatti, so there’s some love there, and truthfully, although it took me a while, I like the New Beetle…I still wish it were a rear-engine configuration, but oh well)…I would feel exactly the same. No joke…this bathroom is cool! The first thing you notice when you walk in is the TV screens built into the mirror (see picture #5) and right above the urinal (see picture #1). I’m not sure if there are TV screens in the stalls, I didn’t check. Ironically, as you can see in pictures 4 and 5, the channel was on CNN, where James Lentz, President of Toyota USA, was discussing before a Senate panel the issues Toyota was having with sticking accelerators (some of those stories turned out to be fake). Finally, in pictures 6 and 7, you can see the sink they had in there. I tried to capture how the thing worked in picture #7, but it didn’t come out very well…anyway, there are no sinks per se. This is a solid slab of granite sloping toward the mirror, with a trough running behind it that collects the waste water and soap. The sink heads are automated and start when you put your hands under them (pretty standard).

For all the cool stuff in this bathroom, I’m giving it four-and-a-half rolls. “But, Bathroom Guy,” you might be asking yourself, “why only four-and-a-half? Why not five?” Let me tell ya, pardner! I’ve seen some amazing bathrooms on the web and in person (for some reason more when I was a kid than now…hmm). Although this bathroom is really cool, it can’t compare to the bathrooms in the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo for orginiality or design, and as I remember them, some of them are five-roll bathrooms).

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