When I was growing up, owning your own washer and dryer was considered, if not posh, then definitely posh-adjacent. Our laundry at home was a sort of semi-attached outhouse thing with no insulation, one rusty sink, and a tap which would cause the oxidised copper pipes to moan and shake. Like a cow in distress.
So every Sunday mum would take my sister and me to our local coin laundry. It became a sort of ritual. We exchanged cash for pressed metal tokens, then helped mum load the week’s washing into machine drums so cavernous they could comfortably hold a six-year-old child (a fact I verified personally). This was 30-something years ago, so I was surprised to discover recently that communal laundries have not only stuck around – they’re making a well-deserved comeback.
In France, they’re known as laverie automatique, or often just laverie for short. In the US, the term has always been laundromat, except in Texas and other southern states, where you might come across the wonderfully kitsch ‘washateria’. In the United Kingdom, they go by laundrette, with some operators still clinging to that vestigial e: launderette. The Germans have perhaps my favourite moniker. They call them waschsalon – wash salons – which seems to neatly capture the special magic of coin laundries: they’re not just for washing but for watching. And chatting. And general milling about.
For many apartment-dwellers, coin laundries are the modern equivalent of the 18th century salon. They’re places for gossip and community and clandestine intrigue. The fact that clothes get washed there is kind of a secondary detail. Seriously, there’s a reason why directors love setting scenes inside coin laundries: they’re evocative, relentlessly ordinary, familiar to everyone, and weirdly intimate. Simultaneously lonely and public. The flickering halogen. The sterile metallic surfaces. There’s always a vague but unspoken sensation that something else is going on. Something much deeper than fabric softener. Coin laundries – or at least the coin laundries I grew up with – are a perfect visual metaphor for boredom, chance encounters and the daily cycle of banality: hum drum, hum drum, hum drum.
Of course, they weren’t always this way. What we think of as coin laundries evolved from the public wash houses of 19th century Britain. In an effort to curb plagues and cholera epidemics, the British government passed the Public Health Act in 1848, and wash houses began popping up all over the country, giving working-class people access to boiling water, large tubs, communal drying areas, and primitive detergents like chloride of lime (calcium hypochlorite) or lye soap (an alkaline mix of potash and tallow that left washerwomen’s hands red raw and cracked). They weren’t perfect, but they represented a landmark leap in sanitation and public health, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that early communal laundries saved an uncountable number of lives.
They also started to represent something else: the crackle and buzz of community.
By the 1900s, many wash houses in the UK came equipped with simple cafes, or even a creche, giving women – early launderettes were almost exclusively the domain of women – a place to catch up, socialise, get some washing done, and entertain the kids.
The first actual self-service laundry is credited to J.F. Cantrell, who opened a facility in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1934, where customers could use four primitive electric washers – for a fee. In the 1950s and 60s, with a baby boom underway and rapid suburban expansion across the developed world, demand for laundry services exploded. And with personal whitegoods still out of reach for most people, coin-operated laundries became standard practice in America, the UK, Australia, Europe and Asia. And the funny thing was, during this time, no matter where you went, or where you washed, coin laundries shared an almost universal design language and general vibe. And there’s a good reason for that: it worked.
The design of the average coin laundry is one of the earliest examples of user flow mapping, even if a phrase like ‘user flow mapping’ would have got you labelled a communist at the time. See, at its core, every coin laundry is about moving customers through a very specific functional process: enter, load, wait, fold and exit. It’s why the entrances often feature a glass frontage (good for safety, plus it encourages walk-ins) and automatic doors (so people can enter the laundry while carrying baskets or bags). Washers are usually near the entrance, driers at the back, because this mirrors the cycle of laundry itself.
There are also practical considerations. Front-load washers are more common, since they’re easier to load, use less water, and allow you to observe your clothes being washed. They give the eye something to do. Dryers are stacked vertically to save floor space. Seating is scattered, but generally faces the machines, and the lighting is almost always bright and fluorescent for maximum visibility (and minimum romance). Well-thumbed trashy mags manifest, as if by magic.
Coin laundries are a bit like docks: there are only so many ways to load and unload things from boats, which is why all docks kind of look like docks everywhere. The generic layout and aesthetics of coin laundries are the direct result of what we might call Design Darwinism: they’re the evolutionary endpoint of washing socks at scale.
