Restroom Archive: A 3D-Scanned Catalog of Public Restrooms

The Restroom Archive (restroomarchive.com) is an ongoing repository of publicly accessible restrooms, designed and built by Jake Welch and still run independently by one person. According to its Info page, 140 restrooms have been archived across 65 cities by 28 archivists — and each entry is a 3D scan that visitors can rotate, pan and zoom directly in the browser.

What the archive holds

Every entry records a restroom's name, location, date and a written description, tagged with descriptors ranging from "Compact" and "Cozy" to "Chaotic", "Graffiti", "Historic" and "Out of order". The catalog can be browsed as a list, a grid or a map, filtered by those tags and sorted by date or name. Recent additions include the Clinton Antique Center in Connecticut, the Tea Kettle Restaurant in Old Saybrook, Café Eiles in Vienna, Cafe Pfeiffers in Berlin, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Icelandic Aviation Museum, alongside restaurants, bars and museums across the United States and Europe; the newest entries are dated 20 September 2026, and each is credited to the archivist who submitted it.

Scans, archivists and rules

Contributing requires an account with submission access, granted case by case; scans are reviewed before publication, and archivists agree not to scan a restroom while other people are present. Under the site's terms, last updated 1 September 2026, contributors keep the copyright to their scans and grant the archive a sole, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to store, display and convert them. The archive commits not to sell, sublicense or redistribute scans — no dataset releases or bulk exports — and prohibits their use as training, fine-tuning or evaluation data for machine learning models.

Privacy and a one-person project

The site is independently run and funded by donations. Its privacy page states that it runs no analytics, tracking pixels, advertising, third-party cookies or data brokers; accounts store an email address, a username and a password hashed with scrypt, IP addresses are kept for under an hour for rate limiting and then deleted, and scans are used on the site and nowhere else. Cloudflare hosts the site, database and files, Plunk sends account email, and map tiles load from CARTO and Esri.

The project documents a space everyone uses and few discuss, and puts the resulting record under unusually explicit usage limits.