I was smug as anything booking the hotel for a recent trip to Amsterdam to see Harry Styles in concert. I expected to wince at the prices, given that Styles had taken a residency at the Johan Cruijff Arena across May and June and people would be travelling from all over Europe. Imagine my glee, then, when I found a room for two a short bus ride away from the stadium for just more than €100. As I quickly swiped through the pictures, the hotel looked modern and cool, with all shapes, angles and porthole windows lit up in atmospheric night-time shots. I’ve never clicked “book now” faster.As it turned out, the shower was in the middle of the room. The shower. Was in. The middle. Of. The room. Not surrounded by a curtain or a wall. Not equipped with one of those flick-a-switch-to-frost-glass contraptions that can be turned opaque. The shower was at the foot of the twin beds, encircled by glass. Presumably, the intention of the test-tube shower is to make it . . . sexy? I get that showering with someone can be pleasant and intimate, if a little risky what with all the slip hazards. But is watching someone shower a turn-on? I’d wager it can’t be enough of a broad societal turn-on to presume 100 per cent of hotel guests will want to engage. I certainly have never been in a romantic scenario where the only thing missing was the ability to watch a significant other wash their bum. Luckily, I was travelling with my good friend Sophie. After an initial dumbstruck five seconds upon scanning the keycard and entering the room, we got down to the business of taking photos of the ridiculous shower, sending them to everyone we knew and posting them on social media. “Why?” we kept asking each other. Why would anyone make such an alien design choice? It felt like they’d seen those hotels that insist on putting a bathtub in the middle of a room and said “hold my beer!”. It could have been much worse. A friend of mine once stayed in a hotel with a relatively new boyfriend and there was a large picture window fitted in the wall between the bedroom and bathroom. She made him lie face down on the bed every time she had to use the facilities. There was one horrifying second when I entered the Amsterdam room where my eyes had registered the berserk shower as a whole bathroom. For that split second, I imagined having to make Sophie stand facing the corner like the Blair Witch while I spent a penny. Except, there weren’t really any corners. Another quirk of the Dutch hotel was that the building was cylindrical and the walls were curved. The television was hanging somewhat limply from a fake tree branch as there were no flat surfaces on which to mount it. I could tell that the original plans for this hotel zinged with words like “contemporary” and “avant-garde” and “chic”. Maybe, if it was located in the coolest neighbourhood in Amsterdam, it might have fit in. But it was beside a motorway and an industrial estate and across the road from a similarly cylindrical KFC. Sophie declared almost immediately that she was going to be using the weird shower before we got ready for the concert. I did the decent thing and lay with my back to her, scrolling on my phone. I couldn’t help but think of some poor beleaguered co-workers on a business trip who might be caught up in a similar situation. A HR bomb primed to go off. A friend once rented a room in a house by the Phoenix Park that had a shower in the corner. It was an incongruous sight, particularly as the bedroom was completely carpeted. At least the Amsterdam shower had the decency to be bordered by some slightly warped laminate flooring. As I watched Harry Styles perform that evening, I tried to picture the hotel room or accommodation he might be returning to after the show. As an international popstar who loves being on stage in front of tens of thousands of people every night, maybe he’d welcome spinning around in the focal-point shower like a ready meal in a microwave. I doubted his lodgings were as KFC- or motorway-adjacent as ours, so ultimately, we were the real winners.