Cloakroom (room)
A cloakroom (from the French for “garder” for guard and “robe” for dress) is a room for storing clothes. The word, which can be traced back to the 16th century in this meaning in German, has also been used figuratively since the 17th century as a designation for stored clothing.
Private cloakrooms
Today, a cloakroom is usually a room in an apartment or a room in a residential building in which residents and visitors can store items of clothing or shoes that they do not need in the house. Sometimes only the piece of furniture in question in the hallway where this shelf is located is referred to as the cloakroom .
The visitor cloakroom is often near the entrance door. Visitors can deposit boots , jackets or coats and possibly an umbrella there, for example . Cloakrooms usually have an umbrella stand , a hat shelf and a mirror . At the bottom there is often a special flooring , the dirt absorbs so that it is not unnecessarily distributed in the apartment.
Cloakrooms for the exclusive use of residents of the house are often referred to as "walk-in closets ".
Public cloakrooms
Cloakrooms can also be found in the entrance area to theaters, discos, museums and other public buildings. Visitors can leave coats, umbrellas and luggage there. You will receive a cloakroom ticket , which is usually provided with the number of the hook on which the coat was hung. Sometimes there is exactly one coat hook with the same number for each seat in the theater, so that the theater ticket serves as a cloakroom ticket. Upon presentation of this cloakroom ticket, visitors can get their stored items back before leaving the building. The job of “cloakroom attendant” (the person who takes coats and returns them) was long considered typically female, but is now also carried out by men. Storage can be offered for a fee or free of charge.
The cloakroom becomes an important part of the income of a theater or organizer. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the cloakroom was even regularly leased to special entrepreneurs. Often for these commercial reasons, but also for safety and cleanliness reasons, there is also a cloakroom requirement: coats, umbrellas and bags over a certain size are often not allowed to be taken into the auditorium of a theater. Theater cloakrooms are very different in different countries: in England, for example, there are often no manned cloakrooms and only a small unguarded room with hooks in which coats and umbrellas can be stored. Most of the visitors then take their coats into the auditorium and stow them away e.g. B. under the seat.
In addition to man-operated cloakrooms, many theaters, museums, libraries, sports facilities and other public buildings have locker systems (often with a deposit system) that perform cloakroom functions.
In kindergartens and in front of classrooms in schools , however, cloakrooms are used that are similar to private cloakrooms and do not require staff (cloakrooms) or lockers.
Web links
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- ↑ cloakroom. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 4 : Forschel – retainer - (IV, 1st section, part 1). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1878, Sp. 1343-1344 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
- ^ Max Epstein : The theater as a business. Fannei and Walz, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-927574-38-4 .