A modern bedroom can be many things – it might be the teenager’s place to listen to music or play computer games, for a child it is a place to play with their toys uninterrupted, and for adults, it is a place to relax and unwind.
We spend time and money making our bedrooms what we want them to be – from adding made to measure storage furniture from places like this fitted wardrobes Hampshire based company lamco-design.co.uk/bespoke-fitted-wardrobes to choosing the perfect bed and mattress that will give us a good night’s sleep.
However, the modern bedroom has evolved a great deal over the years – go back to the 1500s, and the vast majority of people would never have even had a bedroom, it was something only really available to royalty and the very rich at this time. Even so, even the rich would also use the bedroom as a social space, hence the addition of curtains to a bed, allowing the sleeper privacy when there were others in the room! Because the bedroom was also a social space, this is when the opulent décor became popular in wealthy homes, as it was a chance for the rich to show off their wealth and status to any visitors.
In the 17th Century, the rich started to make the bedroom a more private space, and servants would sleep in their own quarters rather than being in the same room. The bedroom evolved through Georgian times and into the Industrial revolution, however it was still likely to be only the wealthier or middle classes that had the luxury of a bedroom. For poor or working-class people in Victorian Britain, they may have one bedroom that would be shared by the whole household!
The 20th Century started to become a time when the bedrooms that we are familiar with today began to emerge. Some people would use armchairs in the room to read and as people in Britain started to live in improved housing and living standards were raised, the ability to have a bedroom that you were not having to share with the entire household became a possibility even to the working classes throughout the mid-20th Century.