Othanian Bathhouses

Purpose / Function

Othanian bathhouses are communal areas where friends and neighbours gather to relax. They often become a meeting place for friends, particularly during cold winters. Smaller towns and villages will sometimes employ their bathhouses for the dual purposes of bathing and washing their clothes. There is often no separation between sexes in these places, except for ones in larger cities like Rionna or Chenya.

Architecture

In Lumin, the building housing the bathhouse is actually just a cottage on the outside. The structure is built around a pool in the ground, roughly the size of an average swimming pool, with a bit of extra room for walking around the bath and storing towels and such. The bath itself is lined with stones, some of which are enchanted with runes that help transport water from the nearest source to keep the baths full as well as keeping the water comfortably warm.
In Yvesland, baths are actually built into the underground network that connects a village's houses. The packed earth floor is usually covered over with wooden planks or stones, and a large, specially designed wood-burning furnace will sit half submerged at one end of the pool to keep the bath hot. These baths are often fed from snow melt in winter and spring, and are stocked with glacial ice for melting during summer.
Both styles of bath house feature natural filtration in the form of aquatic plant life. Water lilies and rushes are popular plants to have growing at the edges of a bath, and scented herbs are often added and cleaned from the water periodically to make the bathing experience more pleasantly fragrant.
Crecia does not have many bathhouses, but the ones they do have more resemble those found in Laspos than those on Othanan

Type

Bathhouse