The Making of Home Read online

  But even in the largest houses, the architecture made privacy in modern terms impossible. Rooms were laid out en enfilade, a series of rooms each opening out of the next, their doors positioned so that they created a grand perspective line of rooms stretching away as far as the awed visitors’ eyes could see. Visually these vistas were a physical expression of the extent of their owners’ wealth and power. Practicality was another matter, and the enfilade forced intimacy every bit as much as a labourer’s one-room house. To get to the last room in an enfilade, it was necessary to proceed through all the intervening rooms, regardless of who was present in each, or what they might be doing. As the Italian playwright Pier Jacopo Martello asked crossly, ‘What, by God, is the purpose of those endless successions of rooms’ where one might come across anyone ‘bouncing along in front of them’ even when on an errand of ‘some urgent need’? The order of rooms along an enfilade was, generally, antechamber, salon, bedroom, cabinet and finally closet, and so privacy could be achieved only by location. As visitors progressed along the enfilade each room became restricted to fewer and fewer visitors, indicating greater privacy, and also an ever-more-privileged status for those allowed access through the sequence and, even more, to the rooms’ users – the person who occupied the final room was usually the head of the household. Even when apartments, groups of three or four linked rooms, as in the Château de Chambord, were created for family or personal use, entrances and exits were still via an enfilade, providing no way of maintaining privacy for the rooms’ inhabitants.

  That the desire for privacy had now arrived in many places is indisputable – the desire was there, but it was the ability to achieve it that was, for the moment, lacking. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch created small privacies through changes in behaviour at home, rather than changes to the architecture of their terraced houses. Visitors were expected to remove their shoes, not on entering the downstairs rooms, but on going upstairs. It was a marker that indicated where the private area of the house lay. Civic legislation, too, required that householders wash the pavements directly in front of their houses, that border between public (dirty) and familial (clean). But it was in England that the modern way of shaping domestic privacy in houses great and small appeared. From the early Tudor period builders and designers had worked on the configurations of buildings to produce the desired results. Initially the staircase was thought to be the architectural element that held the key. Staircases were built in some houses to run directly from the ground floor to an upper floor without access to any intervening floors, often as a method of defence, to protect areas of the house from outsiders; or to protect the rooms that contained the house’s valuables, where certain rooms could only be reached by certain people. Soon stairs were built to create areas of privacy on the same principle of limiting access, joining one room directly to another, the lord’s bedroom to his valet’s, or running from one room to an exit – the apartments that Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, created at Thornbury Castle, not far from Bristol, between 1507 and 1521, had stairs leading from his chamber to a privy garden, to which there was no other access. The most successful, and enduring, of these explorations of how stairs might create or enhance privacy was the duplication of staircases, to confine different types of people to different areas of the house: back-stairs for servants were soon a commonplace in large houses. But staircases were inflexible. Once the house was built, the stairs could not be altered without enormous structural upheaval.

  The development that did most to enable domestic privacy emerged, paradoxically, from the adaptation of an architectural feature that had appeared in buildings that represented the ultimate in communal living – the medieval monastery. Monastic buildings laid out cloisters with arcades around the four sides of an internal courtyard, giving independent access to individual rooms. Architects in the early Tudor period experimented with the idea, adopting the principle but shaping it for use on the inside of a domestic building, rather than the outside of an ecclesiastical one. The result was the corridor.

  The first corridor was designed in 1597 by the architect John Thorpe for a house in Chelsea, and its novelty was made abundantly clear by the elaborate circumlocution needed to describe it to contemporaries: ‘a long entrance running through the entire house’.* The sheer originality of the idea, and the necessity for a total reconstruction of the house’s layout, should have meant its adoption was slow. Instead, a bare twenty-five years later an English diplomat dismissed European enfilades as though he had only ever known corridors. The former, he wrote, put ‘an intollerable servitude upon all the Chambers save the Inmost’, while their raison-d’être, the perspective vista, destroyed the privacy he now automatically expected so that ‘a Stranger [might view] all our Furniture at one Sight’. In his eyes, a desirable house was no longer designed as a hierarchical series of public spaces, but as a discrete set of private ones. When the amateur Sir Roger Pratt designed Coleshill House, in Berkshire, with corridors in the 1650s, he did so, he said, in order to separate family from servants, as well as family members from each other.

  By the nineteenth century, even those like the designer and socialist writer William Morris, who longed to return to the medieval past, never questioned the post-Tudor layout of contemporary houses. Morris and his architect friend Philip Webb planned Morris’s first home, the Red House, as a return to what they knew of the style of living in the Middle Ages. But their medievalism was entirely confined to the décor, while the house’s layout could have been taken from a textbook of Victorian domestic segregation. Here was no great hall for all and sundry. Instead the rooms rarely interconnected, with most rooms having one entrance only. And when, later in life, Morris bought the sixteenth-century Kelmscott Manor, he commented on the ‘peculiarity’ of living in a house without corridors. Privacy was now built into the fabric of the building, and into the fabric of their residents’ minds.

  At least, it was in Britain and the Netherlands. Elsewhere, well into the nineteenth century, many European houses continued to be built en enfilade, as were modern Parisian flats. (The English press which reported on these new buildings in the 1840s no longer recognized the architectural form, and were horrified by the number of doors in each room, and how bedrooms were reached via dining rooms.) But despite adhering to the enfilade design, the French now also borrowed some elements for increasing privacy, preferring a large number of small rooms over a small number of large rooms, to allow individual family members more private spaces. And other privacies were also valued. French architects for the upper classes advised that houses for their prosperous clients should be designed with two connecting bedrooms, for husband and wife, as well as a private sitting room and a dressing room. Or, they allowed, if space did not permit, a single bedroom might have two beds: even that small amount of physical separation was apparently better than none at all.

  This was not, however, a style that all home countries absorbed. Urban Austrian apartments were most commonly designed with interconnecting rooms rather than with corridors. As late as the 1880s, flats were routinely laid out with kitchens, sitting rooms and bedrooms en enfilade. In Vienna, very small apartments, or Kleinstwohnungen, comprising a small kitchen annexe, a sitting room and sometimes a bedroom, all opening out of each other, were the standard layout for the comfortable middle classes as well as the working classes. Grosswohnungen, larger apartments for the rich, also continued to follow the older formula, with most of the space given over to the public rooms, and the family rooms compressed into small back areas. Indeed, one Viennese newspaper in the 1860s lamented that ‘the at home of the English express[es] a comfort unknown to us’ (‘at home’ appeared in English in the original German text, as indeed it did in French texts of the same period: the diarist Edmond de Goncourt wrote that people want ‘les quatre murs de son home agréables’, ‘the four walls of their home to be agreeable’). Even at the end of the century, discussions of the housing styles of different countries centred on how rooms were
connected, and how those layouts reflected views of what – or whom – homes were for. A German resident in London found the ‘most striking’ difference between German and English houses was the lack of communicating doors in the latter. The English, he thought, designed their houses for their families, while the Germans designed theirs to entertain visitors.

  The USA also had a vernacular architectural tradition of enfilade rooms, although there it was a style of the working classes, not of the great. ‘Shotgun houses’, like French apartments, consisted of two or three rooms aligned in a row, their doors set opposite each other so that the entire house, front to back, was visible at a glance. Folk-etymology explains the word ‘shotgun’ by suggesting that a single shot could be fired through the house, from street door to the rear. A more plausible explanation places the origins of both the word and the layout in west Africa (from where it spread via the West Indies to New Orleans), with shotgun a corruption of the Yoruba for house, to-gun. An associated African domestic borrowing was the veranda, which traditionally ran the length of a house, permitting access to individual rooms from an external corridor, just as medieval cloisters had done. Shotgun houses often had a deep porch at the front at a time when, at most, English houses had nothing more than a small vestibule, a space where inside and outside were separated. Some slave houses with these verandas date from as early as the 1770s, long before verandas appeared in New England. The architectural motif may well have spread north via slave housing in the Chesapeake.

  As the actual layout of houses altered to permit new notions of privacy to be integrated, another equally important change was also in process: how rooms were used, and by whom. And because this change did not require the structural upheavals of corridors and other privacy-producing architecture, it affected many more people. When houses of one, or two, or even three or four rooms were inhabited by multiple occupants, the rooms were, of necessity, multi-functional. By the sixteenth century, most people in home countries who lived in houses with more than one room thought of one, or some, rooms as serving public functions, whether it was called the hall or the voorhuis. The Dutch word, literally fore-house, spells out the location, for the public room was most commonly the one that linked the house to the outside. But as yet this did not mean that other rooms were considered the domain of specific household members. In all the rooms, many people carried on many occupations, and they were furnished accordingly. In Leiden until the middle of the seventeenth century, three out of every four rooms had beds or at least bedding in them, and their mixed purpose was indicated by the fact that the rooms were almost never designated by function: slaapkamer, or bedroom, was barely used. Instead these spaces were given either the generic designation kamer, or chamber, or were described by location or feature – the back room, the room with the wall-hangings. At most, activities that made a lot of mess were now confined to a rear space, while clean, or cleaner, activities remained in the main room.

  Although wealthy late-seventeenth-century yeomen farmers in England often had houses with three or four rooms, and the names of some of the rooms had become more distinct, distinct functions had yet fully to emerge. The newly named parlours still had beds in them, while almost all domestic life continued to be carried out in the main room. In the smaller houses of the thriving working classes, the room that had previously been called the hall was now often referred to as the house or houseplace, while the chamber became the parlour. At most, a public–private, visitor–family distinction could be made. In the northwest of England, the foreroom was the room where guests were received, the backroom was for services, while in Scotland, two-room houses had a but (kitchen) and ben (parlour). The but was for houseplace activities: eating, sleeping, cooking, laundry; the ben served more as a parlour, containing the main bed and expensive possessions, such as linen, as well as being a place for food storage. A watercolour from the 1780s shows a Scottish but, where a meal cooks over the fire with its old-fashioned hood with more pans stored above, a bed in the background, and women go about their daily life: reading, brushing their hair, with sewing in a basket beside them (see plate section, no. 9). There are also signs of more rural life: chickens are roosting above, near what are probably hams curing in the smoke. Yet this is by no means an impoverished household, as shown by the luxury goods proudly on display in an impressive dresser.

  By the time of this picture, this type of multi-functional room was becoming rarer among the prosperous in Britain. Where possible, separate backstage space was now reserved for food preparation, whether scaling fish and gutting meat, or just washing vegetables. Only the actual cooking took place in the houseplace, following the pattern of the Dutch. And in German-speaking lands, too, the separations became more absolute as the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth. The Küche, which had been the hall, retained its open fireplace and began to be used exclusively for cooking, while the Stube, the reception room, heated by a stove, was therefore for guests, being smoke- and cooking-free.

  Rooms for specialized activities meant that furnishings, too, were being moved to suit each room’s narrowed function. By the early eighteenth century in Leiden, the number of rooms that contained a bed had dropped from three-quarters to fewer than half. In Britain, similarly, in the south it was increasingly the case that goods were now kept quite distinctly in separate spaces in many houses. Even small houses saw this shuffling about to achieve a room’s purpose. Where space was too small for each room to become single-function, attempts were made at least to indicate public and private areas. One early-seventeenth-century labourer’s house that was typical of many still had beds and storage items in the parlour, but the room also contained a few display elements – a cushion and some pictures – to show that the room was public. Meanwhile, the kitchen, in earlier times used for food preparation and storage, and therefore barely ever furnished, here had two tables, seven chairs and a bench, as well as a cupboard and a shelf, and the eating and cooking implements previously kept in the hall or houseplace: pewter and trenchers, as well as new commodity items such as delftware and a clock. The upper floor was made up of two chambers, which continued to serve as traditional multi-purpose sleeping-plus-storage rooms. The room over the parlour contained a bed, household linens and a lot of storage – two chests, a trunk, a coffer and a cupboard – while the second chamber contained both a bed and cheese-making equipment.

  This style of living survived for a surprisingly long time in the most rural regions of the home countries. Many agricultural areas of Germany, for example, maintained a proto-industrial economy into the twentieth century, with the entire family functioning as an economic unit, and living in a style that had become outmoded some two centuries earlier or before in more industrial home regions. In Sweden, too, old patterns remained: until the end of the nineteenth century children slept with the servants, or wherever there was space, just as families had for centuries.

  It was the urban centres that were the generators of change. In the eighteenth century, the standardization of terraced housing in many British cities collected the service areas (kitchens, sculleries and, in the larger houses, laundry areas) in the basement, or at worst on the ground floor, while family spaces were on the ground and first floors. Increasingly in theory, even if it wasn’t practicable in actual houses, servants slept in basements and attics, with children, segregated by gender and age, in the attics near the servants, or on upper floors, above their parents. It is important always to remember that there is a gap between what architectural plans, journalism and household manuals say is desirable, or fashionable, and what the lived experience of the population was. Today a common view of upper-middle-class family life in Victorian Britain is that couples slept separately, men in a dressing room, women in the master bedroom. However, inventories and sales catalogues show that only 30 per cent of houses large enough to be inventoried had such a separate room for the man, and of those, just 20 per cent contained a bed – that is, less than 6 per cent of larger houses had an
y accommodation for men sleeping apart from their wives. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many guides to domestic life wrote as if all middle-class family houses contained a separate nursery for children; in reality, this was aspirational wishful-thinking, and few beyond the very wealthiest had enough space to be able to devote an entire room to the sole use of any one group of inhabitants.

  Yet the desire for increased segregation meant that the concept, if not the reality, of single-purpose rooms spread rapidly from the urban, fashionable elite to the rural prosperous. In 1825, a magazine article described the alterations made to a farmer’s home in Derbyshire over three generations. The author tells how her grandmother had on her marriage moved into a house with five ground-floor rooms and an unfinished loftspace, ‘open to the beams and the thatch’, that housed the servants as well as providing storage. She built ‘a handsome parlour … with a handsome chamber’, with beds in both. She and her husband slept in the parlour while the chamber was reserved for visitors. When their son inherited, his wife redecorated the now old-fashioned ‘house’, the room the family used as a sitting room, removing the dresser, oak settle and table at which the servants and family ate together, moving the bed into the room next door, covering the bare floor with carpet and building a ‘closet’ out of screens, to store her new items of conspicuous display: a tea service, a silver jug and earthenware dishes. The next generation in turn replaced her pewter dishes in the houseplace with a display of prints, and turned the bedroom next door into a drawing room: a carpet was laid, the walls were papered and the oak furniture replaced by mahogany.