Soft mattresses and private bedrooms are surprisingly recent comforts
A bedroom is mainly for sleeping—beds, closets, nightstands—yet its comforts are recent. Medieval laborers slept on hay-stuffed mats; feather mattresses spread in the 1500s; coil springs only in 1871. Victorian suites added boudoirs and dressing rooms for the wealthy.
In fourteenth-century Europe, poorer people slept on mattresses stuffed with hay and broom straw, and servants bedded down wherever they could, rolling their bedding away each morning. Feather mattresses caught on in the 1500s among those who could pay, while an ordinary man did well to afford one after seven years of marriage. Cotton and wool became more common in the eighteenth century, and the coil spring mattress appeared only in 1871. Before indoor plumbing, a chamber pot under the bed or in the nightstand and a washstand handled hygiene.
A typical Western bedroom holds one or two beds, a closet, and bedside and dressing tables with drawers, and in multi-storey homes it usually sits upstairs. Bed sizes run from an infant's crib through twin, full and queen to king and California king, and rooms are arranged to keep out mosquitoes and to muffle light and noise. Innerspring mattresses sell best, though foam, latex, wool and silk are available from soft to firm. Victorian mansions attached a boudoir for the lady and a dressing room for the gentleman, while live-in servants got the attic rooms, cold in winter, hot in summer and cramped by sloping rafters.
Customs vary. Europeans rely more on freestanding wardrobes and armoires because built-in closets are rarer than in North America, Scandinavian bedding differs from American, and futons are common in Japan. Many North American houses have at least two bedrooms, a master and one for children or guests. Rules on what legally counts as a bedroom set a minimum size and an exit route, but a closet is not required.
Late in the twentieth century the bedroom became more social, and people began spending far more time there. By the 2010s televisions were common, including in the rooms of 43 percent of American three- and four-year-olds, alongside computers, game consoles and desks.
Source: Bedroom
