Who gets to decide what “belongs” in a room? What authority, eons ago, proclaimed that “beds” should be on the “floor” of a “bedroom” and not on the “wall” of a “bathroom”? And why we did we, mindless sheeple that we are, decide to just go along with it?
These are just some of the searing questions raised by Wednesday’s New York Times Magazine profile of Lady Gaga, in which writer Rachel Syme describes visiting Gaga’s house high in the Hollywood Hills, and includes this intriguing tidbit about the star’s restroom decor:
She showed me a bizarre bathroom, where she had found a bed over the shower;
Hm.
So like, there was a bed propped on top of the shower? Was it an old mattress someone was trying to get rid of, but they only got as far as the bathroom before being like, “You know what, I’m tired. Help me hoist this on top of the place we wash our naked bodies, and we’ll deal with it later.” Or had the bathroom started as some sort of tiny house, and then the contractors decided to build a sprawling mansion instead? And what does it mean that Gaga “found” it? Did it appear one morning, a fully-dressed California King left behind by generous but decor-challenged faeries?
To answer our questions, the Cut reached out to Syme. The bed, she explained, dated back to when rocker Frank Zappa owned the house (Gaga bought the house from his family trust in 2016).
“I only saw it for the BRIEFEST glimpse,” Syme said. “And she did not put it there — it is apparently a holdover from the Zappa family woodland fairy era of the house, when musicians were always crashing there and so they needed to put beds wherever they could (more specifically, this was the handiwork, I think, of Zappa’s wife Gail). I wish I had more to tell you, but it’s like … a small loft bed over a tub area?”
So, what Frank Zappa was to music — an innovator, a satirist, a mad scientist — Gail Zappa was to bathroom remodeling. Don’t have room for all your artsy friends who are always overstaying their welcome? Stick one of them over the tub. It sounds like a pretty nice setup, actually. You could wake up, and drop directly into the embrace of a nice warm bath, and at night, the humidity of the bathroom would do wonders for your skin.
Case closed. And read Syme’s full profile here.