bedroom
The bedroom , also known as a sleeping chamber (small bedroom), sleeping room or cubicle , is a room in an apartment or a residential building that is mainly used by users for sleeping . The bedroom is also the place where couples have sex most often . 32% of all Germans also die at home, mostly in their bedroom.
The architectural segregation of special bedrooms, as it is the norm in wealthy countries of the western world today, is historically young and is by no means the rule worldwide even in the present. In many cases, residents sleep at night in rooms that are used for living or working during the day. In Japan, the sleeping mat (敷 布 団, shiki-buton) was traditionally put away during the day. Even in cultures where people traditionally sleep in hammocks ( Latin America ), they are hung up during the day to save space.
In affluent countries in the western world, the sleeping function of a room is only combined with other functions if the cramped living conditions do not allow a functional separation. This applies, for example, to very small apartments ( Garçonnièren ) and residential units in student residences , old people's homes and the like, but also to children's rooms ; in countries like the United States , children often have a playroom ( family room ) in addition to their bedroom .
In large parts of Europe, bedrooms often contain beds as well as a bedside table for storing various utensils with a bedside lamp and alarm clock as well as a cupboard for storing clothes (see also wardrobe ). The floor is often fully or partially carpeted because it is more comfortable to walk on it with bare feet than on parquet or tiled flooring .
In large apartments and houses, some bedrooms are only used for sleeping; There is a walk-in closet or a separate room for dressing.
Overview of the historical development of the bedroom
Bedrooms are a comparatively modern development in Central Europe. Using a room to sleep alone has long been a strange idea. The historian Judith Flanders points out that for the development of the bedroom in today's sense it was not decisive whether a sufficiently large part of the population lived in houses that had enough rooms, but that it was the development of a completely different concept of the Needed to live together. This concept divided living space according to its functions (eating, sleeping, cooking or washing), according to gender (men and women or boys and girls), according to social hierarchy (rule and servants or servants) and according to generations (parents and their offspring). The Middle Ages did not have such a separation. There, the great hall of the medieval castle or the only room in the cottage was the living space that everyone shared as living, dining and sleeping rooms, regardless of social status, degree of relationship, age and gender. This was often the only heated room. Flanders did not see the first signs of the development of a concept that allows spaces to be separated according to person or function until the 15th century: the large townhouses that were newly built in Italy during the Renaissance period framed an inner courtyard and public and private Functions were assigned to different wings of the building.
Even when a house divided according to functions was already the ideal of domestic coexistence, its implementation was not feasible for a very large part of the population. Having a room that a single person or couple uses to sleep only became a reality for large parts of the population of the western world only in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The decisive driver was industrialization, which went hand in hand with urbanization and the emergence of new residential buildings, which enabled a growing segment of the population to live according to this ideal. Accordingly, bedrooms are found earlier in urban than in rural areas, and wealthy strata were more likely to implement this modern ideal of living together than poor people.
Living without a bedroom: the reality of large proportions of the population well into the 20th century
Judith Flanders is of the opinion that today's people in the western world are so used to a standard of living that has gradually emerged through industrialization and urbanization that they have lost awareness of their special features. Until the 20th century, the historical reality for the majority of the western population was a life in a confined space without separate sleeping accommodations.
The living situation of the working class was very cramped across borders in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Philadelphia , seven people shared a single room in the late 18th century. At the end of the 19th century, for example, many workers and lower middle class families in Berlin took in so-called sleepers because living space was scarce and expensive as part of population growth and urbanization. Maids in middle-class households rarely had their own unheated attic room for sleeping; they often turned down their bed in the evening in the kitchen, bathroom or hallway. In all major European cities, maids also slept in the loft . These were small spaces that were created by adding an additional ceiling over the pantry, over the bathroom or over the hallway in the high living rooms. One of the most apt descriptions of a loft is given in Theodor Fontane's novel Der Stechlin (1899), which has a maid report:
“There are always [the lofts] in the kitchen, sometimes close to the stove or directly across from it. And now you climb a ladder and if you are tired you can fall down. But mostly it works. And now you open the door and push yourself into the hole, just like in an oven. That's what they call a bed. And I can only tell you: it's better in a hayloft, even if there are mice. And it's worst in summer. It's thirty degrees outside and the stove has been on fire all day; it's like being put on the grill. "
Even in sprawling stately homes in the 19th century, servants were expected to share their bedrooms with others. For example, a valet who worked on a country estate in Ireland in the 1860s reports that he shared his room with three to four other male servants. Some of his colleagues slept on folding beds where the focus of their work was. In the second half of the 19th century the one-room turf house was the typical home of settlers on the North American prairie. Around 1890, from southern Minnesota to Texas, there were more than one million such houses in which families shared a room at night. I.
Up into the 20th century, special bedrooms were an unaffordable luxury, especially for people from the working class. In post-war Germany , bedrooms were scarce: the Allied bombings had destroyed many apartments and houses, refugees and those who had been bombed out were forcibly quartered by state institutions ( housing management ). Many people were forced to sleep in the living room , and special armchairs and sofa beds were developed for this. In the 1960s, the situation eased, and in addition to the parents of a small family , the children were often given their own room.
history
Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times
In the Middle Ages and also at the beginning of the modern era, people typically slept where they spent most of their day. It was not uncommon to share your sleeping space with other people you were not related to or intimate with. This did not only apply to the servants of a manor: beds like the Large Bed from Ware , which originally stood in an inn, were built to accommodate several sleepers. Label books still give tips for the 17th century on how to behave when sharing a bed with strangers. Straw beds or sacks filled with straw were the typical sleeping pads. In medieval castles, the lord and lord of the castle usually retreated to a separate room in the evening, which also served as a retreat during the day.
The first beds appeared in Central Europe in the Middle Ages ; they were a privilege of nobles, wealthy citizens, and wealthy free farmers. They were mostly simple wooden frames. Elaborately carved four-poster beds were still the exception in the Middle Ages and in modern times they were usually the most valuable furniture in a household. Even though it has become increasingly common, this bed has also been found in modern times in rooms that the landlord and hostess shared with children or particularly valued servants . Jan van Eyck's painting Arnolfini Wedding , created in 1434, shows a Bruges merchant and his presumably newly wedded wife. The painting, which is of great importance in art history because of its iconography , depicts very wealthy citizens. This is indicated by the fur-trimmed clothing, the mirror, the carpet lying on the table and the oranges lying on the left in the window. The curtains of a large four-poster bed can be seen on the right of the painting. This also symbolizes the wealth of this couple. The fact that this is in the reception room was typical at the time: a four-poster bed with its valuable fabric hangings was such an obvious sign of prosperity that in the Netherlands even the number of families who put the bed there increased.
The representative function of a richly furnished bed remained in use beyond the Middle Ages. Even during the Renaissance period in Italy, even in newly built palazzi, it was customary to set up a bed in the reception room, although the homeowners usually slept in another bed in a less publicly accessible room. In Leiden around the middle of the 17th century there were beds or at least bedding in three out of four rooms. Rooms were also not named according to their most important function, but either carried the generic name chamber or were named after their relative position in the house or special features. It was not until the 18th century that the idea gradually set in that a bedroom is a space of retreat that could not be entered without a specific invitation.
17th and 18th centuries
From around the 17th century, wealthy farmers and merchants had sufficient living space to have special bedrooms. These were typically on the first floor of a two-story house and often the second bedroom could only be accessed by crossing the first bedroom. In Great Britain, the narrow terraced house , which is already typical there, already had a sufficiently large landing on the first floor so that the second bedroom could also be reached without crossing the first. Corridors became increasingly common in larger houses so that each room could be reached from a hallway. As a result, bedrooms have increasingly become exclusive, private rooms. In Leiden in the Netherlands, at the beginning of the 18th century, the number of rooms in a household in which a bed was placed fell from two thirds to half, which indicates an increasing functional separation. The separation of people according to their social class, which for example meant that servants and employers slept in completely separate rooms, began at least in Great Britain in the 18th century. The historian Judith Flanders uses court files to show how little this implementation was. While in 1710 a house was so severely separated according to social class that servants and employers did not even use the same stairs in the house, in a house built at the same time with owners from the same wealth class the niece of the landlord shared the bedroom with a female servant in the attic and a noble roommate shared his bedroom with his valet.
The bedroom was still to a certain extent a room in which guests were welcomed for card games, tea or the like, even for wealthy circles. Samuel Pepys , today best known as the diary author and chronicler of the restoration era under King Charles II of England , visited his superior's wife in 1665 and was welcomed by her and her friends not only in their bedroom, but also a seat on the bed offered. Madame de Maintenon , a morganatic marriage to the French King Louis XIV , used the room where the king also conferred with his ministers as a bedroom and dressing room.
Around 50 years later, these customs were found to be increasingly outdated in Great Britain, while in France the bedroom was still used by strangers. In William Hogarth's painting The Countess' Morning Levee (dt .: Lever Countess ) from the cycle Mariage à la Mode , which originated in the period 1743/1745, live with no less than ten people the morning ritual of a nobleman. Her four-poster bed can be seen in the background of the painting and is in an alcove. A hairdresser, a flute player, a priest, a friend, a singer, a dark-skinned page and a boy who sells toys are present. The fact that the British Hogarth caricatured this morning meeting in the bedroom of a noblewoman with his painting is evidence that entering such an intimate space was increasingly felt to be inappropriate. This attitude was even more widespread among the British upper class. Around the middle of the 18th century, Horace Walpole was angry about the fact that during a stay in France his sister's bedroom was entered by strange male servants to bring her things. In Britain by then it was already the social norm for the servant to have given the desired things to the maid of the young woman and only that more familiar person to enter the bedroom.
Victorian era
In the Victorian era it became the norm for rooms to be strictly assigned to one function. Privacy was not only considered desirable, but essential. The Architect , an architecture magazine of the time, noted that using a bedroom for anything other than sleeping was unhealthy and immoral.
Privacy was not only considered desirable, but essential. Ideally, the bed should already be positioned in the bedroom so that it was not immediately visible when the bedroom door was opened. It should also be positioned so that it is not exposed to drafts from the fireplace, window or door.
For the most affluent social class in Britain, who lived in sprawling houses, it was unthinkable for a married couple to share a bedroom. The husband was expected to sleep in his dressing room. Even the landlady, at least according to the social norm, had not only a bedroom, but also her own dressing room, a so-called boudoir . Judith Flanders points out, however, that there is a gap between what journalism, architecture magazines and advisors describe as desirable or modern and the life experience of even those parts of the population who theoretically have the wealth to implement these standards. She believes that the idea that it was common for the majority of the upper-middle class in Britain for married couples to sleep separately is a myth, referring to inventories and similar documents. Only 30 percent of the houses that were large enough to be inventoried had a separate dressing room for the host, and of these only 20 percent also had a bed. Based on this, Flanders concludes that only 6 percent of the large houses had the possibility of married couples sleeping separately. For the majority of families, including those of the middle class, it was still customary for the beds for the smaller children in the household to be in the parents' bedroom.
Bedroom of the wealthy
For the wealthy, bedrooms were no longer a room furnished with the worn furniture of other rooms. Insofar as the financial possibilities of a household allowed it, he now had a specially purchased carpet. The furniture was made of mahogany if possible and consisted of a table, a cupboard, a dressing table , chairs, a small bookcase, a vanity unit and a chest of drawers . The use of coat hangers only became common in the second half of the 19th century, clothes were folded in drawers and stored in cupboards.
Bathrooms and in-house toilets did not become common until the second half of the 19th century, with flush toilets being introduced a little earlier. As long as such bathrooms were not available, residents would wash in their bedroom or dressing room. From around 1870 it was typical in Great Britain that hot water came from the pipes on the upper floor even in newly built middle-class houses, but in smaller houses this was limited to cold water until the end of the 19th century.
The vanity was usually made of birch wood, as this light wood, unlike mahogany, did not show water stains as clearly. The large water jug, which the servants filled with warm water from the kitchen in the morning, and the wash bowl stood on the washstand. Porcelain bowls were ready for the soap and the sponge. The chamber pot usually stood under the washstand. In a well-tended household, all the porcelain objects had a uniform pattern. However, advisors recommended that the water jugs, china bowls, wash bowls and chamber pots should be purchased in a uniform design for the entire household, as they often broke and could then be replaced with items from the inventory.
There were devices on the side of the washstand to hang up the towels. Rooms that were big enough also had a couch. Occasionally there was also the hip bathtub in the bedroom, which was also only filled by bringing warm water and emptied again in a similar way. Until the middle of the 19th century the bed was usually a four-poster bed, richly draped with fabric. On the other hand, there were no bedside tables, as are common in today's bedrooms.
Although gas lighting became increasingly common during the 19th century, only 20 percent of British households were equipped with such a facility by 1885. Even in those households that had it, it was not recommended for use in the bedroom. It was standard that the person going to bed carried a candle holder with a candle. Wealthy households placed two candles each on the ledge above the fireplace and on the dressing table and placed a packet of matches next to them. In his children's book Pooh the Bear , AA Milne had the waking Pooh light his candle in 1926.
Bedding for servants
The servants' bedrooms were furnished quite differently. Counselors suggested to employers that a servant's bedroom should show as few features as possible. A bed with unbleached sheets, a simple bedspread, a chest with drawers, a mirror, a vanity, and a chair would be all a servant would need. After all, it was widely accepted that every servant should have his own bed. The idea that each of the servants should have their own room was still strange towards the end of the 19th century. In a large, newly built house in the London borough of Kensington, it was planned in 1891 that the three maids would share a room next to the kitchen as a bedroom. The two male servants slept unchanged on folding beds in the dresser or the scullery. The bed frames for the servants were increasingly made of iron: unlike wooden frames, they offered lice and bed bugs less hiding places.
Keeping a Victorian bedroom tidy
The air in the 19th century contained more soot and dust particles than is common at the beginning of the 21st century. This was due, on the one hand, to the predominant use of coal as a heating medium and also to the unpaved roads on which horse-drawn vehicles operated. Contemporary representations report that the air was so laden with dust that long women's hair was so dusty after a ride in a carriage that the hairbrushes with which this dust was brushed out had to be washed and dried. The easiest way to protect the furniture was to spread white, comparatively easy-to-wash cloths over everything.
Next to the kitchen, the bedroom was the room most likely to be infested by vermin. Among other things, this was due to the fact that mattresses were made exclusively from organic material: mattresses made from horse hair were considered to be of the best quality, those made from cow hair were cheaper to buy, but did not last as well. Those made of wool were even cheaper. Straw mattresses were still used in affluent households: They were placed under the actual mattress and were intended to protect it from the bed frame. Ideally, each mattress was wrapped in coarse linen to protect the mattress from dirt. In turn, an undercloth held the individual mattresses together. All of these mattresses had to be turned and shaken up every day, otherwise the organic material would become matted and clumped together. Making a bed accordingly meant taking apart all of the bedding and reassembling it. There are precise studies from the first half of the 20th century that estimate the time required for a fully made bed to be 30 minutes per bed. Every year, the mattresses should also be opened and the mattress filling cleaned and shaken up. However, the historian Judith Flanders is of the opinion that this step was so complex that it was only actually implemented in very few households.
Fight vermin
In addition to fleas, bed bugs have been a problem since the 17th century that has been mentioned again and again and its occurrence has increased since the 18th century without knowing the exact reason for it. It is possible that the more densely stacked cities in the context of industrialization contributed to the spread. When the respected Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle moved into a new house in London in 1834, Jane Carlyle stated that her house was the only one of all her acquaintances that was free from bed bugs. Until 1843 she managed to keep her house free of bed bugs, but then bed bugs were found in her maid's bed, which was standing in the kitchen:
“I emptied some twenty buckets of water on the kitchen floor to drown those who were trying to save themselves. After killing all [bed bugs] we could find, we put every part of the bed in a bathtub of water and carried it into the garden, where we left it for two days ... then I treated everything with disinfectant , washed all the curtains and had them put away first .. "
The radical measures were successful and the bed bugs seemed to have been eliminated. Ten years later the same problem arose, whereupon Jane Carlyle sold the wooden bed and bought an iron one for the maid. For a few years her husband, who according to the Victorian ideal slept in another room, complained that he had also been bitten by bed bugs at night:
“Although living in an outside world full of vermin, I had completely freed myself of the worry of them appearing in my own house, having managed to keep [my house] free of such atrocities for so many years. But the simplest course of action was certainly to examine his bed carefully [...] instead of discussing the baselessness of such a suspicion with him. Feeling a little hurt, I took apart his blankets and pillows. But then suddenly I had to pause: I saw something the size of a pinhead and a cold shiver ran over me. As sure as I was alive, this was a young bed bug! And .... as small as this bug was, it had to have parents - maybe even grandfathers and grandmothers ... "
In the case of such an infestation, it was customary for the bed frame to be completely dismantled with the carpenter. The bed frame was treated with disinfectant and just like the bedding with insecticide. This was repeated over several days. In severe cases, the room containing the bed and bedding was hermetically sealed and sulfur burned in the room .
20th and 21st centuries
Positions of individual architects
In the 20th century, even within the western world, individual architects had different ideas about the bedroom.
One of Frank Lloyd Wright's major concerns was to gather families in a strongly accentuated common room - especially by its open fireplace. Bedrooms in Wright-designed houses tend to have low ceilings; they give their residents a strong feeling of protection and invite them to rest. At the same time, these bedrooms are small and offer no space for furniture or activities. According to Wright's idea, residents should really only use the bedrooms for sleeping.
Situation in different countries
Germany
In 1967, the German Institute for Standardization stated in DIN 18 011 the standard floor space of a master bedroom with 14 m². The number was a recommendation for government-subsidized housing.
In 2006, 8.8% of all households had a television in the bedroom.
United States
In the United States there is very often a bathroom ( master bathroom ) with a bath or shower, sink and toilet, which can only be entered from the master bedroom . The average footprint of a master bedroom in an American home is 28,707 square meters. A TV is available in 64% of all master bedrooms. Wardrobes (. Engl wardrobes ) are unusual in American bedrooms; Instead, there are built-in closets ( closets ), which are often as spacious as a small room especially in big houses ( walk-in closets ).
literature
- Pascal Dibie : How to make a bed. From bearskins, state apartments, burrows of vices and lotter beds . dtv, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-423-30388-3 (German edition of Ethnologie de la chambre à coucher )
- Judith Flanders: The Making of Home . Atlantic Books, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-78239-378-8 .
- Judith Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . Harper Perennial. London 2003. ISBN 0-00-713189-5 .
- Ben Highmore: The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House . Profile Books London 2014, ISBN 978-1-84765-346-8 .
- Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland : Sleep and the bedroom in relation to health . Gädicke, Weimar 1802
- Josef Kern: "How to make a bed". Notes on the bedroom theme . In: Bayerische Blätter für Volkskunde NF 4 (2002), Heft 1
- Lucy Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . Faber and Faber Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-571-25953-3 .
See also
Web links
Single receipts
- ↑ Study on the sleeping (and sex) habits of Germans. Accessed December 31, 2018 .
- ↑ Dying at home - wish rarely becomes a reality | DAK health. January 1, 2019, accessed August 2, 2020 .
- ^ Places Where Sleeping in Hammocks is the Norm. Accessed December 30, 2018 .
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1157
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . Preface
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1285.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 982.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1037.
- ^ Theodor Fontane : The Stechlin , 1899.
- ^ A b Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 7.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1016.
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 3.
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 5.
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 8.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1109.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1123.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1247.
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 10.
- ^ A b c Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 11.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1268.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 392.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1109.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1116.
- ^ A b c Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 12.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1143.
- ↑ a b Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 9.
- ^ Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 13.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: A Room of One's Own , Ebook position 1288.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 2.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 4.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 286.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 287.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 6.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 5.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: Hearth and Home , Ebook position 3299.
- ^ Flanders: The Making of Home . Chapter: Hearth and Home , Ebook heading 3292.
- ^ A b Worsley: If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home . P. 14.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 2
- ↑ a b c Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 10.
- ^ Highmore: The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House . P. 171
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 12.
- ↑ a b c Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 13.
- ↑ Flanders: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed . P. 14.
- ↑ More than Just a Fireplace: The Hearth, the Kitchen, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Accessed December 30, 2018 . Frank Lloyd Wright House in Michigan Listed for First Time. Accessed December 30, 2018 .
- ↑ How much space do people need? - Room sizes according to DIN. Accessed December 31, 2018 .
- ↑ Study: TV in the bedroom is trendy. August 6, 2006, accessed December 31, 2018 .
- ↑ master bath. Accessed December 31, 2018 . Master bathroom. Accessed December 31, 2018 . Six Bathroom Design Tips. Accessed December 31, 2018 (floor plan examples).
- ↑ Average Bedroom Size May Surprise You. December 15, 2017, accessed December 31, 2018 .
- ↑ Television Statistics: 23 Mind-Numbing Facts to Watch. November 16, 2015, accessed December 31, 2018 .