Setting aside matters of taste, there are things in this life that are beyond reach: I’ll never own a superyacht, say, or a collection of cashmere Loro Piana sweaters, fastidiously folded and laid side-by-side in a cavernous mahogany walk-in with alcove lighting. But there are a few luxuries we little people can afford, if we really want them: Good ice cubes, fresh flowers around the house, and, at the upper limits of unadulterated opulence, an outdoor shower.
The times I’ve showered en plein air, whether at vacation rentals or friends’ homes, were surprisingly freeing, à la the skinny dip; when your bathing experiences for the past 20 years have been in cave-like settings that no amount of eucalyptus boughs or candles can remedy, sudsing up outdoors is an epiphany. Without exaggeration, if you’ve never bathed exposed to the elements, a little sun, perhaps a breeze, and a rainfall showerhead is la dolce vita, people.
Early this summer my wife and I moved into a small standalone in Central California with two beds, one bath, and another artificially lit shower. One day I looked out our bedroom’s glass-paned door that opens into the sun-dappled backyard and decided a new fate for ourselves—we could be some of the lucky ones.
You might never be able to spend recklessly on lids of caviar for the homies, or own an Italian villa where you’re free to fritter away an inheritance making bad paintings, but I’m here to tell you that luxury, however you want to define it, is within reach. If you have a yard with at least a little privacy, with a few days’ work and $1,000—less, if you want—you, too, can install an outdoor shower that will pay lifestyle dividends that far exceed your tax bracket.
Finding the Spot
In planning where to put the shower, I was pacing around our backyard, stopping, looking up at the sun, scoping sight lines to neighbors. I would also just sit and stare out our dining room windows, trying to visualize where a shower might figure into our yard. I must have looked like a mad person. Ultimately, placement came down to three factors: privacy, good light, and access to a water hookup. The best spot ended up being against a hedgerow close to our bedroom, where there was a spigot, and our neighbors’ sight lines would be blocked.
My first instinct was to build a deck off the stairs that lead to my bedroom, creating a platform that could host a shower.
As you can see, even with an enclosure, that would have left us exposed to the two-level home that peers into our yard. Placing the shower against the hedges provides complete privacy from the next-door neighbor, even if it doesn’t look like it here.
Designing the Shower
You can build an outdoor shower fast, if you want to. In fact, you don’t have to build anything. Place this concrete-based option, connect a hose, and get to bathing. You can pound this one into the ground with a mallet in a matter of minutes.
I wanted to dream bigger than that. And I love custom things. So I started by perusing examples on Pinterest and, of course, this website, to decide what I liked. My first instinct was to go minimalist and fix a copper shower apparatus to a 4×4 post so that it would “disappear” into the hedges behind it. But doing that would have missed an opportunity to make this more of a design moment in our yard. Being a fan of Molly Sedlacek’s designs at her landscape design and outdoor product studio ORCA, this outdoor shower caught my eye.
Iterating on sketches in my notebook helped me “see” the finished shower—figuring out its proportions, where to place it, achieving balance between the copper pipe, its backstop, and the 10-inch showerhead I ended up buying off of Etsy. (Here’s my entire outdoor shower collection, if you’re looking to replicate this aesthetic.)
Making sketches of the shower—even ones as crude as these—helped me visualize the design and how it would figure into the yard.
Parts of the concept came together on the hardware store floor. At my local Ace, I laid out planks of wood on the ground—for hours, mind you, because picking grain is an art—to envision the shower’s backstop, toying with pairing different widths and lengths. The rough cut redwood 2x10s I first brought home ended up not being quite right, so I heaved the eight-foot planks back onto my car’s roof racks and swapped them for Douglas fir, a 2×8 and 2×12, with more of a “polished” look off the rack. The idea was to attach the shower fixture to the smaller plank so it would feel balanced with the bigger, naked one. The bigger one, too, would frame a zone to step out from under the shower head. (I would have used cedar for its durability outdoors, but couldn’t find wide-enough pieces locally).
Building the Backstop
To create the shower’s backstop, I positioned the two planks on the ground, leaving a small gap, and screwed in cheap stakes to hold them together. (Note that if you do a gap between the planks, as I did, it will become more pronounced as the wood dries out.) I then set the planks aside for the time being to prepare the area where I’d put them in the ground.
With the shower area plotted out in the yard, I started clearing gravel, and made cuts in the hardware cloth and landscaping fabric underneath, peeling them out of the way. The planks for the backstop were eight feet, and I wanted to bury one foot of that in the ground. That meant digging a foot and half down to fill half a foot with three-quarter-inch gravel, which would allow any water to drain away from the ends of the wood to prevent rotting. A tip from me: Make the hole as wide as you think you need to so that when you add the cement, it will support the planks. (Sorry that’s not more scientific.) You can also wrap the ends of your wood in plastic, as I did, which, in theory, will help prevent rot. (Just remember to leave the bottom open so water can leave the wood.)
I had two levels on hand, so I taped them to the planks, adjusting the stakes to plumb the backstop before pouring concrete.
Next was plumbing the backstop—making it perfectly straight. After pouring a little gravel into the pit, I placed the backstop to get a sense of how it should stand. Then I screwed four stakes into the sides and back so it would stay upright on its own, making subtle adjustments to each until the backstop was perfectly upright. To make sure my work was sound, I taped levels to the front and side, but there’s probably a better tool for this.
With the planks positioned, I poured quickcrete into the pit around them and added water per the instructions.
(Note: If you want your wood backstop to last a long time, it is a good idea to let the wood dry out for about a month and then seal it. I was impatient and just built my backstop and put it in the ground, and then sealed it a couple of months later using Real Milk Paint Co.’s Outdoor Defense. It has good reviews, and is nontoxic, which I am a sucker for.)
Making the Drainage Pit
With the backstop in place and stakes removed, I started digging the drainage pit. This is the part where I learned how heavy dirt is, especially when it’s damp clay, as it is where I live. I dug a four-by-four-foot pit two-feet deep, with a slight slope that followed that of the yard’s so the water would drain in that direction, away from the house. I filled debris bags as I went and when finished, was tempted to dump the some-1,000 pounds of dirt mob-style at the end of a dark road somewhere. But like the smooth operator that I am, I hauled them to the local waste management center and, for a small fee, let somebody else do the dirty work.
After the concrete dried around the backstop, I dug a drainage pit, making it two feet deep and larger in circumference than the piece of flagstone I planned to put down so water would run off the edges and collect in the gravel.
I used three-quarter-inch gravel to fill the drainage pit, packing it down with a tamper tool.
With the pit dug, I lined it with landscaping fabric and left the edges long so that once the gravel was poured in, I could wrap it like a package. This part is important! If you don’t protect the gravel from the surrounding dirt, sediment will fill out the nooks and the pit won’t take water or drain properly.
The next step was satisfying: I filled the pit with bags of three-quarter-inch gravel, packed it down with a tamper tool, then pulled the long edges of the landscaping fabric across the top and tacked it down with gardening stakes.
Picking Flagstone for the Floor
If you’ve never been to a rock yard, go now, even if you don’t have any reason to. It is inspiring to be in the presence of that much weight. I was so inspired, in fact, that I chose a slab that was ultimately too big—a lesson I learned the hard way. A nice man at the yard forklifted the rock into my truck, and when I got home, I didn’t have a way to place it on my own. (We’re talking 150 pounds of awkwardly distributed weight). And, it was too big to function properly anyway! It would have covered most of the drainage pit I worked hard digging.
At the rock yard, huge trucks were being filled with slate, flagstone, and boulders by the ton. I picked out a three-foot-wide piece for about $40.
What if I pushed it out of the back of my truck? I thought. It might fracture in a cool way. I pushed and got a pile of jagged slivers. Dismayed, I set these aside and went back to the stone yard. This time, I grabbed the right piece: a slab of Arizona peach that wasn’t so heavy I couldn’t heave it alone, in a size and shape that allowed for water to run off the edges into the drainage pit. Back at home, I placed it under where I envisioned the water falling relative to the backstop and then swept the ground-cover gravel back into place around it. Now I had a buttoned-up yard with a backstop that was ready for a shower fixture.
Building the Shower Fixture
First a note about going custom: There was some YouTubing that had to happen to make sure building a copper fixture was within my wheelhouse. This video was my crash course in soldering, which is as easy as it looks. I did this on the tailgate of my truck, with the parts I was blasting with heat hanging off the side. If you don’t want to solder, you can bypass it altogether with these push-to-fit pipe connectors, but your shower will look knobby, not slick. Cutting custom lengths of pipe, like I did, will require either a pipe cutter or saw. (Or maybe someone nice at the hardware store will do it for you.)
If you are going custom, decide ahead of time whether you are going to trench to connect to your home’s plumbing for hot water, or run a hose to your shower. I chose the latter, less expensive option, partly because I could get away with hiding a hose behind a short retaining wall buttressing the hedges where I was putting the shower, and tap-temperature water is perfect for warm Central California summers. (I would later decide to add a tankless water heater for year-round use—more on that below.)
Similar to how I decided on the wood for the backstop, I laid out copper pieces and fixtures on the floor to decide how it should look and function. I wanted a spigot at the bottom to wash feet or fill a dog bowl, a single valve for on/off, a tee joint to run behind the backstop to connect the hose to, and, of course, the showerhead. All the pieces are there for you in the plumbing section of your local hardware store to feel this out.
To build the fixture, I laid out parts to get a sense of how male and female ends would meet. Some pieces are threaded, while others require soldering.
Half-inch copper pipe felt like the right size to me aesthetically. After about two months of use, I’m still happy with the showerhead I purchased, but, we have hard water, so perforations get clogged with limescale, requiring a vinegar-and-hot-water soak from time to time to bring it back to full working order. (Something like this brass showerhead from ORCA might not have that issue.) This ball-joint adaptor lets me position the shower head and remove it as needed. For any parts that screw together—the shower head; the valve; the spigot; the hose—be sure to use plumbers tape around the threads for a leak-free seal.
Before hanging the fixture, I drilled a three-quarter-inch hole in the backstop for the pipe connecting to the hose to run through. After that, I hung it on the backstop. I used the most basic copper hangers I could find, though there are nicer options. I built my fixture so that the horizontal arm for the showerhead would come flush with the top of the backstop, which stands at seven feet, and the showerhead would hang high enough for my wife or I to use comfortably, which ended up being about six feet, six inches.
From here, we screwed in the hose, turned on the valve, and voila! An outdoor rainfall shower. Miraculously, my first go at soldering pipe held up, with no leaks. (Later, when unscrewing the showerhead to adjust something, I dropped it, cracking a seam. The solder I applied has held up so far.)
Hooking Up the Tankless Water Heater
Once the weather started to cool off and we realized we still wanted to use the shower comfortably, we added a tankless water heater. Of course, with all the work I put in thinking about the shower’s aesthetics, I wanted something that looked good. But it ultimately didn’t matter since I’d be hanging it out of sight. In my research—combing through Reddit threads and reading reviews on companies’ sites—the best options were heaters equipped for camping. These are meant to live outdoors, somewhat—you shouldn’t leave them out in the rain, or expose them to freezing weather—and hook up to a propane tank.
In my limited understanding, you want a unit that matches or exceeds the flow coming from your spigot, otherwise it won’t heat the water very well. If you don’t know what your flow rate is, there are easy-to-install devices you can buy to check it. Gasland sent over a unit to test—a 16-liter tankless heater that can handle 4.22 gallons per minute. I liked that Gasland’s heater had a temperature-control knob with an accompanying digital display, so you know exactly how hot the water coming out is. It also has a flow knob, which gives you further control over temperature—at a lower flow rate, the water heats more quickly, and gets hotter.
I fixed a tankless water heater to the side of my house out of sight. The unit has temperature and flow controls, and a season toggle that tells it how many burners to use.
If you are handy with a drill, installing the unit is surprisingly easy. I put two screws with drywall anchors directly into our home’s facade, and metal tabs at the top of the heater let you slide it over the screws. Taking it down is just as easy, which, for anyone that lives somewhere with heavy weather, makes it easy to stash the unit for the winter. The rest is pretty plug and play: screw in your hoses—buy thread adapters if you need them; I did—and connect a propane tank. So far, the heater is working like a dream. It heats water fast. Like, 100 degrees in 15 seconds fast. It heats water more quickly than my kitchen sink or the indoor shower, which are on a separate, electric tankless water heater for my home. Your propane heater’s efficiency will of course vary depending on your climate.
Finishing Touches
I “decorated” the shower with some big rocks, which, along with some plantings, help frame the shower in the yard. An outdoor metal table my wife and I have had for years has suddenly found its true calling next to the backstop as a place to put a towel, soap, and other bathing essentials.
I bought a small metal soap holder to attach to the backstop’s wider plank, but every time I hold it in position, it doesn’t feel right. I’ll keep toying with that. I also like the idea of a hook fixed to the backstop to hang a towel, but for now, draping it over the edge of the backstop keeps it at hand but out of the way of water.
The single-valve fixture delivers water at the temperature we set it to on the tankless heater. The backstop, which has a sealant, will silver with time, and the copper will patina, too. The shower will feel more and more private as the hedges continue to grow in.
Now, with a newly installed outdoor shower just down a set of steps set against a hedgerow, our socioeconomic stratum is materially unchanged, but we feel wealthy. In summer, a turn of the valve delivers a rush of ground-cooled, 60-some-degree Fahrenheit water that’s perfectly refreshing in the heat of our sun-soaked Central California backyard. In any other season, the tankless heater delivers a steamy 104 degrees in a matter of seconds, turning our garden into a spa-like en suite that, if I may say so, is nothing short of pure luxury.
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