3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

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American Master Bedrooms

Should Just Split Up Already
Image: Photo by George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images) (Getty Images)

Emily Alford
12/10/20 1:30PM 236 5

House Tour
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3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

An exploration of the floor plan’s histories, mysteries, and

fantasies
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Everyone sleeps alone. One might go to bed with a partner or friend or stranger, but
no one ever truly sleeps with anyone. In our private unconscious, each of us exists,
regardless of our surroundings, in a state of complete solitude. Yet despite this fact,
romantically partnered adults are expected to bunk up like college freshmen in a
dorm room—or else anyone who notices the separate sleeping arrangements
assumes the relationship is headed towards dissolution.

The reason for this expectation of synchronized slumber could be that unlike wealthy
Europeans, even upper-class American homes mostly only ever included one main
“Mother’s room,” where both mother and father were meant to sleep, as opposed to
the “bachelor’s room,” where a single man might sleep alone. But—especially given
how little sleep we’re all getting—American bedrooms should probably split up as
soon as possible.

The concept of a private chamber devoted to sleep is a modern invention, long

limited to those who could afford such a privilege. The wealthy houses of medieval
Europe had great halls where members of the household slept alongside one another
on “beds” that were little more than a heap of leaves. What we think of now as a bed
did not come into fashion until the 15th century, and even in the 16th century were
the province of the rich. The bed was often the most expensive item in the home, and
landowner, wife, children, and servants would sleep “Pigged” on this giant bed, with
each person assigned a designated spot. Often, these massive, ornately carved beds
included a main, curtained-off bed along with pull out trundles for children and
servants. Even as the idea of separate bed chambers for select members of the house
came into fashion, lower-ranking servants slept alongside each other while the more
highly ranked shared beds with the heads of household. It was completely normal for
traveling companions to share a bed as well, long after sleeping rooms split from
social rooms. According to Atlas Obscura, “In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John
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3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

Adams spent a night sharing a bed at a New Jersey inn which was largely passed
bickering over whether to keep the window open or closed.”

In the 17th century Dutch or English colonial American home, the master bedroom
doubled as the entry parlor, where a family kept all its nicest possessions, including
the home’s “best bed,” typically reserved for the master and mistress, according to
Elizabeth Collins Cromley in “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms.” But by
the mid-18th century, upper-class New Englanders had adopted the English trend of
adding landings, hallways, and centrally located staircases to homes in order to
create dedicated rooms for different purposes. In America, however, for the upper
and middle classes, the home’s main bedroom was still connected to rooms used for
entertaining, though more private, dedicated spaces for servants and children were
often found upstairs. But trends toward individualizing sleeping spaces by
decorating children’s rooms according to gender also had the trick of making them
more private, and the “Mother’s room” (which was the term for what we now call the
master bedroom) was generally tailored to a wife’s needs rather than a husband’s:

“While the modern married couple’s bedroom is almost invariably called the
“master” bedroom, most nineteenth- and twentieth-century descriptions assume
a bias toward the wife’s needs, listing dressing tables, mirrors tall enough to see
the hem of a dress, and lounges on which to rest during the day as necessary
elements in the couple’s bedroom,” Cromley writes. “Nineteenth-century
descriptions often call this room “mother’s,” even though father slept there too.”

Late 19th-century focus on health and sleep hygiene would further individualize
sleeping areas, with doctors increasingly recommending even married couples sleep
separately. In the mid-1800s Dr. James Copeland even worried that shared beds
meant that one sleep mate could, quite possibly, be sucking the life out of the other,
particularly in the case of young women married to old men, which both feels correct
and probably is not: “Young females married to very old men suffer in a similar
manner, although seldom to so great an extent … These facts are often well known to
the aged themselves, who consider the indulgence favourable to longevity, and
thereby often illustrate the selfishness which, in some persons, increases with their
years.” Though many living in crowded and unsafe tenement conditions in cities like
New York had no choice but to sleep in communal rooms and beds, those who did
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3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

have that option went for double beds, which were standard in a middle-class
married couple’s bedroom by the 1920s and 30s.

Illustration: B. Picart

Another, possibly more appealing, option, was simply opening bedrooms up to allow
one person to sleep indoors and one person to sleep semi-outside, which many
experts recommended as a means of warding off sickness. In a 1909 issue of Country
Life, architect C. K. Shilling introduced his plan for a modern and moderately priced
home that included a sleeping porch attached to three of its four bedrooms. They
sound absolutely lovely and like they would make ample provision for tuberculosis-
free space or just the option of being sort of in another room:

“These have screens in the summer and canvas shields in winter, with floors of
reinforced concrete. The outdoor spaces are incorporated under the main house
roof and thus do not read as porches but as part of the body of the house.”

Other, slightly less appealing options for extending one’s bedroom and allowing for
more fresh air and less crowded sleeping arrangements included window beds,
which “extended over the windowsill at night, and the sleeper pulled an awning over

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3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

his head to protect himself from the rain” or “fresh air tents” that were fitted to a
window but covered the occupant’s bed with an opening on each end to allow fresh
air and conversation:

“This tent had a window on the bedroom side so the sleeper could converse with
others in the room, and it could be used in a double bed where only one person
wanted the air. If the weather was cold, one could use a hood with a shoulder
cape that left only the eyes, nose, and mouth exposed to the air.”

But despite the appearances of early black-and-white television sitcoms, by the

1950s, double beds (and presumably sleeping tents) were considered old-fashioned
and sexually repressive. As the idea of marriage evolved from a religious and/or
financial agreement to a romantic one rooted in personal fulfillment, so too did ideas
around the purpose of the single marital bed. English eugenicist Marie Stopes, for
example, was infuriated by the concept of separate beds, ostensibly because they
kept the people she wanted to fuck from fucking:

“Many of their inhabitants get devitalised, irritable, sleepless and unhappy,”

Stopes wrote in a 1956 book called Sleep. “I think, because of them. The twin bed
set was an invention of the Devil, jealous of married bliss.”

And stereotypes of the unhappy, sexless couple who prefer separate beds or even
separate bedrooms have abounded even as adults become more sleep-deprived. A
recent study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 35 percent of American
adults sleep less than the recommended seven hours a night. According to the Better
Sleep Council, 85 percent of Americans say that they have problems sleeping at
night. Of those, 40 percent say that those problems are due to a partner tossing and
turning and 32 percent report sleep complications due to a partner snoring. One
widely circulated 2005 report put a quarter of couples sleeping in separate beds,
leading many news outlets to label the phenomenon a “sleep divorce.” More
accurately, however, the concept is just prioritizing good sleep over having rooms in
the house going largely unused, like dedicated guest rooms, and extending the same
importance to one’s own restful sleep that is extended to a guest or a child.

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3/8/2021 American Master Bedrooms Should Just Split Up Already

Rich baby boomers, who grew up when separate beds were beginning to be
demonized as marriage killers, are now reversing course, leading the charge on the
sleep divorce just like they did regular divorce, with one-third of those in the fancy
home market, most of whom are boomers, searching for “dual master bedrooms,”
making this perhaps the first time rich boomers have been correct about something
since they made Joni Mitchell famous. “It happens way, way more than we think,”
said architect and author Sarah Susanka, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune back in
2015 when the concept was still relatively unheard of. “One of the interesting parts of
being an architect is that you learn a lot about your clients and how they actually
live.”

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But how most of us live is completely exhausted and too physically close to other
human beings. For those of us who are not rich Boomers, the idea of space is mostly
a dream in the midst of a housing crisis that “has been quietly building for half a
century,” according to Foreign Affairs. However, the nearly century-old social
constructs that keep adults in relationships pigged in bed like two founding fathers
bickering over an open window in the Garden State are an outdated form of
relationship policing that insists couples must always desire each other’s company
even, or for some reason especially, while unconscious. That’s bullshit. Sleeping
hours are in too short of a supply to have them interrupted for keeping up
appearance’s sake. The divorce of the American bedroom has been a long time
coming and is very much for the best.

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DISCUSSION

Devonna
12/10/20 1:44PM
I’m curious how many partnered folks would rather sleep alone? I prefer sleeping with my guy.
Usually he and the dog sandwich me in, which is both cozy and occasionally stifling.

See all replies

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