In 1710, a French furniture maker invented a piece of bedroom furniture for aristocratic women. He carved it from wood and topped it with a glazed porcelain basin. He called it a bidet — French for 'little pony' — because to use it, you straddled it. It was a quiet revolution: a tool for women to maintain their own bodies, daily, without the help of a servant or the fuel for a bath.
An Origin in Care
The earliest bidet was made around 1710 by Christophe Desormeaux — not a plumber, but a furniture maker. He designed it at the request of upper-class clients who wanted a private way to attend to themselves between full baths. In the world before indoor plumbing, this was no small thing: bathing required servants, fuel, and time most women didn't have to spare.
By 1751, Madame de Pompadour — mistress of King Louis XV — had a bidet carved from rosewood, decorated with gilt bronze fittings and floral relief. Napoleon, decades later, would leave a silver bidet in his will. These were not utilitarian objects. They were heirlooms, status symbols, and tools of personal sovereignty.
A 1772 French manual on feminine hygiene put it plainly: 'Attending to the cleanliness of the delicate parts of the body is an unavoidable necessity. These parts must be washed every day, with all manner of aromatic herbs or alcohol-containing liquids added to the water.'
Las partes delicadas. The delicate parts. Considered, intimate, daily.
"The bidet was, from the beginning, a tool of feminine autonomy disguised as a luxury good."
A Spanish Story
By the 19th century, the bidet had migrated from French bedrooms to bathrooms across Catholic Europe. It traveled south to Spain, Italy, and Portugal — countries where intimate hygiene was already part of daily culture, where the act of washing the body was not something to whisper about.
In Spain, the bidet became sacred to the modern bathroom. Throughout the 20th century, no middle-class home was complete without one. It was solid, discreet, and had a purpose as clear as it was unspoken. It was, as one Spanish writer put it, 'a domestic symbol of status — a marker of the modern, hygienic home.'
Spaniards in their fifties and sixties grew up with bidets in their childhood bathrooms. Their abuelas used them. Their mothers used them. The horizontal jet, the small ceramic bowl, the corner of the bathroom where it sat — these were as much a part of Spanish domestic life as the rice in the paella.
What We Lost
Then the apartments got smaller.
By the 2010s, Spanish bathrooms were shrinking. New construction homes were averaging four to five square meters of bathroom space — barely enough for a toilet, a sink, and a shower. The bidet, with its separate ceramic body and plumbing, didn't fit.
In 2026, ninety percent of new construction homes in Spain are being built without a bidet. Experts predict the traditional Spanish bidet will disappear from new housing entirely within a decade.
What's notable is that Spaniards didn't stop wanting bidet hygiene. The culture remained. The bodies remained. The desire to wash with water remained. What changed was the architecture — and with it, the daily ritual that two hundred years had taken to build.
"Spaniards didn't lose the bidet because they stopped wanting it.
They lost it because their apartments got smaller."
Olava
Olava began with a simple question: what if the daily ritual could fit?
The under-seat bidet attachment is not new. It exists, in various forms, in bathrooms across Asia and the United States. What is new is treating it as something other than a utility — designing for the body, for the bathroom, for the ritual.
Our name comes from two Spanish words braided together. Ola means wave. Lava means she washes. Olava is the wave that washes — a name born of water, for a product that returns water to the most considered minute of the day.
Designed in Barcelona for the European bathroom. Slim enough to fit any apartment. Considered enough to feel like a return, not a compromise.
I'm Sophie. I grew up in Singapore in a household where bidets and water hygiene were normal. When I moved to Spain, I learned that Spaniards had the same culture — for centuries. But somewhere between the 20th century and now, the ritual quietly disappeared.
Olava is my return to that ritual. I hope it becomes yours.
— Sophie, founder