Bathroom hand towels are experiencing a renaissance of sorts in the design world, similarly to how a pump of Aesop soap at the sink once signaled a certain level of taste. You’d spot the soap in the powder room at a dinner party, or in the house of someone whose style you admired. By the early 2010s, the brand’s amber-toned bottles had become a small marker of design literacy and luxury bathroom decor (long before “quiet luxury” was ever coined). As Vogue once put it , the designer soap was “as much a status symbol in the beauty world as the Bottega Veneta pouch is in fashion.” But with any widely adopted trend, ubiquity has a way of diluting it. What once felt insider-y is now expected and it’s not just about the soap these days. According to a couple of AD PRO Directory designers I talked to, the hand towel plays a defining role in interiors. And And And Studio renovated a 1960s Laurel Canyon adobe , using cork walls to add an earthy element to the powder room.…