Two British homes were actually public toilets in the past. One of them is on Oxford Rd, West Reading, an Old building built in the 1930s for public convenience.
According to Domain, one of these public toilets is the largest toilet-to-home conversion project. Called the Rose Cottage, it will be offered to let once conversion from a toilet to private residence is completed. Before the project was started, it was sold at an auction last July. Surprisingly, it went under the hammer at a price eight times its guide price of around $19,000.
Converting a public toilet into a private residence is not an impossible job. As an evidence, architect Laura Jane Clark of Lamp Architects has shared photos of her previous project on a blog. It was originally the Crystal Palace underground public toilet in London, now it is a one-bedroom private house, wherein she resides.
According to The Telegraph, when she told her family and friends that she was going to live in an underground former public toilet in south-east London, she received mixed reactions. There were even those who politely asked if she was still in her right mind. "I was known as Laura Toilets for a while," Laura said laughingly.
She bought the underground toilet in 2011 and after spending about £65,000 in renovation, the house was completed in March 2012. Today, it is hard to tell where the urinals for the gents and the toilets for the ladies used to be. It is a light-filled underground one-bedroom residence with a stylish gold-leaf bathroom and underground garden. Creating her home was no easy task. According to Laura, "I ended up doing a lot of the laboring work myself, because it was such horrid, hard work that I struggled to keep people on the job. And filling skips is character-building."