Room

• 1. The Space Behind the Door

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  Walls rise on four sides, and a single door is the only way in. That is the deal a room makes with you. It is an enclosed space inside a building or a ship, bounded by walls, reachable only through a door or some other dividing structure. The door connects it to a passageway, to another room, or to the open outdoors. There is room enough inside for several people to move about. But why does one room hold a bed while the next holds a stove? Why was a kitchen once banished from the house entirely, and why do some British homes hide a tiny chamber too small to be anything but a puzzle? The size, the fixtures, the furnishings, even where the room sits within the building or ship, all bend toward the activity meant to happen there. Sometimes that structure is not a building or a ship at all, but a train.

• 2. Walls From Deep Time

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  Around 2200 BC, on the island of Santorini, the people of early Minoan culture were already living in clearly defined rooms. Excavations at Akrotiri reveal them, and the detail is startling. Some rooms were built above other rooms and joined by staircases. The bathrooms held alabaster appliances, washbasins, bathing tubs, and toilets. All of it connected to an elaborate twin plumbing system of ceramic pipes, one set for cold water and one for hot.

  Ancient Rome pushed the form much further, with very complex buildings and a wide variety of room types. Among them stand some of the earliest examples of rooms made for indoor bathing. Across the ocean, the Anasazi civilization developed an early and complex arrangement of room structures, probably the oldest in North America. The Maya of Central America had very advanced room configurations as early as several hundred AD.

  By roughly 200 BC, during at least the early Han dynasty in China, complex multi-level building forms had emerged, built especially for religious and public purposes. These many-roomed structures stacked rooms vertically and connected them. Long before any of this, the earliest builders had already sorted their spaces into bedrooms, kitchens, bathing rooms, closets, reception rooms, and other specialized uses.

• 3. Rooms That Work

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  Kitchens, pantries, and root cellars were built to serve the labor of the household, all of them turned toward preparing and storing food. A home office or study handles household paperwork or outside business. Other work rooms simply take the name of the task done inside them. A sewing room is for sewing. A laundry room is for washing and ironing.

  Comfort and cleanliness claimed their own spaces too, in the toilet and the bathroom, which might be combined into one room or kept apart. The public version is the restroom, usually fitted with a toilet and handwashing facilities but not a shower or a bathtub. Showers turn up only in athletic or aquatic facilities, paired with a changing room.

  In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, anyone who could afford it kept these functions at a distance. The kitchen was detached from the main house, or later sunk into the basement, to cut the risk of fire and to push the heat and cooking smells away during warm months. The toilet, often just a simple pit latrine, went into an outhouse or privy, keeping the smell and the insects clear of the home.

• 4. Rooms For Company

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  The great hall earned its name from sheer size, not from any excellence. In earlier centuries, very large homes built one, and it was most likely found in the main residence of a noble estate. Originally a public room, it was where people with business to bring before the local landowner or his household could come to meet him. Being the largest room, it doubled as a dining room for great banquets. Clear out the tables, bring in music, and it became a ballroom. Tucked off to one side, or in another part of the house, a drawing room offered more privacy for the owner's family and their friends to talk.

  A sitting room, a living room, or a parlour serves social visits and entertainment. Decorate one to suit a man and it might be called a man cave. In an older style, a man who wanted a room of his own used the cabinet. The wealthiest homes set aside rooms purely for amusement, among them a library, a home theater, a billiard room, a game room, or a music room.

• 5. Where We Sleep

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  A bed defines the bedroom, and sleep is its first purpose. A master bedroom may open onto an en suite bathroom. A guest room is the bedroom kept mainly for overnight visitors. The nursery belongs to babies or young children, and it may stand apart from the playroom, where the children's toys are kept.

  Sleeping rooms often took on second jobs. A large house might hand each task its own space, like a dressing room for changing clothes, which also appears in clothing stores and businesses where people change but do not sleep. In Tudor times, a bedroom might hold a separate closet for praying and seeking privacy, and that idea survives today in the storage closet.

  Many houses in the United Kingdom include a box-room, easy to spot because it is smaller than the rest. Its size limits it to a small single bedroom, a small child's bedroom, or storage, and some box rooms house a live-in domestic worker. In country houses and larger suburban homes up until the 1930s in Britain, the box room held its namesake boxes, trunks, and portmanteaux rather than a bed. In Ireland, a return room is a box room added between floors at the turn, the return, of a staircase. Such rooms may be built as extensions and sometimes converted into a kitchen or bathroom. A sick room, sometimes only large enough for a bed, let a family member be tended and kept apart from the household while recovering from illness.

• 6. One Room, Many Lives

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  In smaller homes, most rooms had to do several jobs at once. A bedsit, a communal apartment, or a studio apartment may fold nearly every function into one main room, leaving out only the toilet and bath. The great room takes the opposite path on purpose, stripping away most of the walls and doors between kitchen, dining, and living areas to open one larger space.

  A lady's boudoir blurred the line in its own way. In some places it combined a sleeping room with a place to entertain a small number of friends. In others, the boudoir was simply an anteroom set before her bedroom. The en-suite room offers a modern version of the private retreat, pairing a private room with a private washroom and access to a communal kitchen. That washroom usually holds an en-suite shower, a sink, and a toilet. For students especially, the word en-suite signals a private space built to provide study room and a peaceful environment to live in.