The $100,000 shower

After a long flight, there's nothing like stepping into a hot shower. After a long anything, in fact, there's nothing like stepping into a hot shower. At the Coeur d'Alene Resort in northern Idaho, I step inside the ultimate hot shower. It has 18 shower heads that spray my body from head to toe in a synchronized dance of hot and cold, hard and soft. Each head, wrapped in a blue, handblown glass escutcheon, has been custom-made by a glass artist. A silver spout above my head pours a firm stream of mountain water over my shoulders. Video: See the shower

After five minutes inside, 250 gallons of this mountain water have enveloped and massaged me into what I can only compare to a post-coital stupor. And it has all happened at the touch of a button, choreographed by a computer programmed to relieve my stress.

I am left with the question: Would I pay $100,000 to have this experience every day? And, more to the point: Would you?

Taylor Galyean, the shower's inventor, is betting that you might. "You can design different sequences for different types of therapies," he says, sitting in the relaxation room of the resort's spa. The relaxation room overlooks deep green cedar forests and a crisp blue mountain lake. "The shower is like a massage therapist. We've programmed it to be attentive to the

way it delivers water to different parts of your body." Video: "It creates hydro-gymnastics"

Galyean is an architect with a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the son of Tag Galyean, who has been designing spas and spa products for more than 40 years for his namesake company, the Tag Studio. Taylor Galyean and I have met up at this spa so that he can tell me about -- and let me experience -- his latest invention.

The Coeur d'Alene is not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find a touchy-feely Zen experience. The crowd runs to beefy golfers with Western swaggers and Rotary Club wives in turquoise taffeta dresses, who dine over fried lake bass and roar around in souped-up motorboats.

But the resort is also one of just four places in the United States -- two spas and two private residences -– that possess one of Galyean's high-tech hydrotherapy wonders. Ever since the Tag team installed it in the resort's new $10 million, two-story spa, this supershower has been drawing crowds.

Still, the shower's pedigree is less rough-and-tumble Rockies than Rodeo Drive. A few years ago, Galyean explains, a well-known Hollywood producer fell in love with the experience of a traditional Swiss shower. In

the world of hydrotherapy -- a medicinal treatment that has been around since Roman times and recently come back into vogue -- Swiss showers are known for their numerous high-pressure heads and therapeutic effects on the circulatory system.

While designing his megahome in Los Angeles, the producer approached Tag to see if the studio could design a similar shower for his home. His would be bigger and better.

"He said that the shower is the place where he thinks and gets his ideas," says Taylor, who declines to reveal the producer's identity.

But the traditional Swiss shower is a labor-intensive instrument. The Tag team explained to their high-end client that he would need an attendant to operate that type of shower, and that it might be impractical to have one come to his home every time he wanted to take a shower.

"Then I told him that I've always dreamed of computerizing it," says Galyean. "He said, 'That's what I want.' "

So Taylor, his father and his brother, a mechanical engineer, set to work on the design. They decided to use 18 shower heads combined into six zones, and

developed a way to control the water with a computer. How it works: Battle stress . . . or cellulite

The Tag team brought in Monica Tuma Brown, a spa consultant who once created a line of mineral salts from water she gathered from oceans around the world. Brown suggested programming different combinations of temperature and pressure to promote relaxation, stimulation or a mix of the two. "The skin is one of our most vital organs," Brown says. "Water has a curative power, in that it can stimulate nerve receptors which act as transmitters to all our organs."

For the Hollywood producer, she and the Tag team came up with a morning "stimulation" sequence to promote better thinking. "We programmed it to take the temperature from 110 degrees and then drop it down to 90 degrees with cool bursts of 80-degree water," she says. "It flushes out the toxins, like going from a sauna to a cold plunge."

In this ultimate spa machine, you don't even have to move. I stood in the center of the shower and locked in the "relax" sequence. Streams of warm water came from every direction and gradually built in pressure, moving up and down my body, changing from hot to cold to lukewarm. Video: 65 gallons of water per minute

Brown told me that neutral temperatures tell the nerve receptors in the skin to relax the body. After each change of temperature, I could feel my skin loosen and my muscles melt, in the same way they do during a firm massage. And like a massage, when the sequence ended, I wanted more. So I reached out of the shower and pressed the "shape" sequence button.

Brown says this sequence will help increase my circulation and smooth out embarrassing lumps of cellulite. Suddenly needles of water were shooting at my thighs, rear end and stomach, alternating between hot and freezing cold. It felt like my skin was simultaneously heating up and cooling down. When the sequence ended, I don't think I was cellulite-free, but my butt tingled in a just-brushed-your-teeth kind of way.

Next, I decided to try to the "tonic" sequence, which is supposed to flush out toxins and stress -- and the martini I had on the plane the night before. In this sequence, the computer is programmed to deliver intense, 102-degree heat to your shoulders for deep penetration, while bursts of 80-degree water hit the sides of your body and flow over your head. Maybe I was toxin-free, but as I stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel from the heated towel warmer, I also felt pretty lightheaded.

I then realized I might never again get to experience a shower like this, so I stepped back in for just one more sequence. At this point, my skin was beginning to prune. But for a grand finale I chose the "relief" sequence, which is all about getting heat to the muscle tissue. Firm hot water started shooting at my shoulder muscles, while cooler streams of water washed over my lower back. As I sank into deep chill mode (or maybe I was just waterlogged), I started to imagine all the sequences I might program for my life: the "Wake up! You have a deadline!" sequence, or the "Chill out, it's only a family dinner" sequence.

Later, Galyean told me that clients can actually request new combinations to achieve different therapeutic effects -- even once the shower is installed. "The shower is on a network, which allows us to customize new sequences remotely," Galyean says. Video: Change your shower program remotely

I appreciate the complicated thought put into this system, and I can't argue that it wasn't deeply relaxing. I now see my skin on a whole new level. But on the plane ride home, I wondered whether the high price -- and the high-tech bells and whistles -- were really the key. Maybe I would have felt the same if I had just jumped into the crisp lake. After all, that can stimulate great ideas, too.