This 118-Year-Old Home Has a Retro Bathroom Feature That’s So Small-Space-Friendly

Historic and vintage houses contain all sorts of hidden gems and unique features, like Victorian stair clips and razor blade slots in bathroom walls. I recently came across another retro fixture that I’d never seen before that would be so useful in my own small apartment bathroom: a tissue box built into a wall.

A TikTok creator named Samantha recently shared a video full of clips from the old home she just moved into. “First night in our 118-year-old house,” an overlaid caption reads. “Part 1 of fixing the pink bathroom.” If you’re familiar with older homes, you probably know how common pink bathrooms can be. Some people renovate away any evidence of pink, but Samantha took the opposite approach, adding some modern touches all while making the entire bathroom even pinker.

Color aside, one intriguing component of this decades-old bathroom is a rectangular box with an oval-shaped hole in the middle built into the wall, which Samantha is seen reaching into and pulling out a tissue. I had never seen this before, so I wondered if that’s really what it was intended for. “With its location higher up on the wall and nearer the sink, plus the inclusion of a built-in toilet paper holder on the side wall within easy reach of the toilet, this is most certainly for tissues,” explains design historian Maile Pingel. “Their contemporary descendants would perhaps be the kind of metal tissue dispensers we sometimes see mounted onto hotel bathroom vanities.”

Obviously, most houses and apartments these days do not come with a wall-mounted tissue box — so why did they used to be a built-in bathroom component? “Kleenex tissues were originally developed as a cotton substitute during WWI (they were used as filters to line gas masks), with the company rebranding them as handy disposable face towels in 1924,” Pingel explains. “So it would have made sense to position a built-in holder near the sink.” 

According to Kleenex parent company Kimberly-Clark, the “pop-up” tissue box we use today came on the market in 1929, giving consumers a portable way to store and dispense tissues one at a time. This shift “is probably what made the built-ins obsolete,” Pingel notes. It also means these tissue holders were only popular for a few years, so finding one still intact today is a bit impressive. Personally, I think it would be nice to have a tissue dispenser already attached to my bathroom wall. “Maybe they’ll make a comeback,” Pingel quips. “Who isn’t short on counter space? I certainly am!”