Restaurants themed around vintage toilets are starting to pop up around London.Chef Tom Sellers' new restaurant, Story, opened last week in London with great anticipation. Sellers, 26, had worked at Thomas Kellers' Michelin-starred restaurants Per Se and French Landry as well as at Noma in Copenhagen, which has been called the world's best restaurant.
The restaurant is ironically located on a former toilet block. Another recent restaurant opening, The Attendant in London has been built around a former Victorian toilet that was built in the 1890s reported CNN.
"We kept everything, including the original teak Attendant's office door, which we converted into our little kitchen," says Attendant owner Peter Tomlinson to CNN. "There is even a 1950s hand drier still on the wall.
"Floors, walls and urinals made by Doulton & Paisley at their Lambeth Factory on the shore of the River Thames in 1890 are all original."
Each urinal has been built as a seat and the restaurant is underground. "After two-years planning and restoration the old Attendant's office has been turned into a little kitchen and the original porcelain urinals have become an inspired line with green seating to match the original Victorian floor tiles," says The Attendant's website.
"It's no different to an espresso bar or restaurant in the middle of a department store which has no natural light," said Tomlinson to CNN.
Tomlinson told the BBC that everything has been jet washed and the soil stacks had been capped and concreted. "It smells beautiful down here now," he said.
The urinals are now table tops which was a conversion that cost more than £100,000.
Even homes have started to be converted from old toilets. A British woman, architect Laura Jane Clark spent more than £60,000 converting an abandoned toilet in South London to create a one bedroom flat. Her living room used to be the mens stalls and urinals and her bathroom was a former attendants office.
Crystal Palace, south London, to create her dream one-bedroom flat.
She said to the BBC, "I love the originality of living in a toilet."
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