Master Bedrooms and Master Suites

Companionate Marriage and Marital Space

In the colonial and early Republican eras, the average American house contained only one main room, sometimes (but not always) with sleeping lofts; this multipurpose room served every household function: working, cooking, washing, eating, socializing, and sleeping. Any kind of privacy—let alone marital and sexual privacy—would have been nearly impossible to come by, perhaps unneeded in a time when labor consumed most hours of the day, leisure was rare and fleeting, and marital unions were formed largely on practical concerns rather than romantic attachments. Adding a “chamber” for sleeping reflected an advance in home architecture, though initially that sleeping room might still have served all members of the household, including servants (both kin and nonkin). As increases in wealth and technological developments expanded house square footage, rooms still served multiple functions: homeowners might have received guests in a bedroom or perhaps kept the marital bed in the parlor, children and servants frequently slept in the same room, and families dined in rooms also used for family businesses. By the early part of the nineteenth century, however, expensive homes began to have rooms for designated use, and by the end of the century upper- and even middle-class homes grew large enough for several rooms to serve unique purposes: parlors reserved for company, dining space just for breakfasts, servants’ quarters, dens for the father and sewing rooms for the mother, and rooms only for sleeping. Single-purpose rooms signified wealth and status, making a many-roomed home (even if the rooms were small) more desirable. Even middle-class city dwellers of a certain class could secure apartments with designated room uses. ³ The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century house, even a small one, fitted just this model, and if not everyone could attain such a residence, all could aspire to its standard.

Early home expansions were piecemeal efforts: home builders threw up walls here and there to create distinct rooms, with doorways so that residents could pass through adjacent and tandem rooms. Most rooms contained multiple ways to get in and out, and connected rooms often had very different uses, so a bedroom might be accessible through a dining room, parlor, or kitchen. Cromley notes that it was standard to include a sleeping chamber attached to the main reception area as late in the 1890s and this would be occupied by the heads of the household, even in a multistory home with the rest of the sleeping chambers on the second floor. ⁴ But by the turn of the century, she indicates, two changes took shape. In a multistory home, middle- and upper-class house designs moved most or all sleeping chambers to the second floor. And, whether in a single- or multiple-story building, bedrooms had less access: one door only, and then usually (though not always) from a corridor rather than from another full room. ⁵ Hubka and Kenny note that working-class families needed several specific alterations to their homes to meet middle-class standards; along with a fixed bathroom and dining room, this included a private bedroom dedicated to the parents’ use. ⁶ With this, we see an increase in the privacy of the bedroom, a chamber increasingly off limits to anyone other than family, and a room designated for sleep but not socializing, at least not for nonkin. Bedrooms became destinations rooms, rather than places to pass through. (The rise of a fixed bathroom, also site of highly intimate activities, also required a privacy zone.) Reserving all these rooms to the second floor let the staircase bar nonresidential visitors, or noisy occupants who might disturb sleepers. In a single-story home, a corridor created the barrier, as bedrooms and bathrooms shifted to one side or the back of the house, less and less radiating directly from public rooms. Moving the conjugal bed from view of guests further hid the most intimate part of a marriage from scrutiny. Once bathrooms gained a permanent spot in American homes, the early twentieth-century powder room—bathroom with toilet and sink only—discouraged guests from ever needing to ascend the stairs or venture to the bedroom wing. Home designers and householders themselves began to think explicitly about the public and private areas of their home, initially reserving the “best” part of their homes—the entry hall, front parlor, the dining room—for company, saving their best things for those rooms; private rooms, like bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms, which guests would not visit, did not warrant as much in the way of expensive furniture or fancy decor.

Because separating public areas from family-only rooms required a larger dwelling, privacy in the home thus became one way a family could signal its status. ⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, an ideal middle-class home included enough bedrooms for a family separated by distinct generational and gendered units: parents, babies, children and, perhaps grandparents. Ideally, noncoupled residents had rooms of their own and if children had to share, it should only be with same-sex and similarly aged siblings. Two- or three-story homes—the standard for middle- and upper-class families—might retain a first-floor bedroom, good for a mother and her newborn, or the grandparent who could no longer manage the stairs, or a temporary sickroom for a convalescent. A second floor, however, contained all or most of the bedrooms and usually the ones in permanent use. The new science of sleep which flowered in the late nineteenth century encouraged quiet, separate bedrooms for each child; a lessening of fear of masturbation meant children could be left without adult supervision. While separate sleeping for married couples might enhance sleep hygiene and perhaps act as a form of contraception, only the most expensive mansions offered adjoining marital bedrooms and even then only rarely. Home designers, and home buyers, assumed the married couple shared a bedroom, an assumption that continues to this day.

But in a many-bedroomed home, homeowners had to choose who slept where, and so in the last 150 years bedroom assignments and bedroom placements have shifted throughout the house. In particular, as Vollmer et al. demonstrate, the room assigned to the marital couple has moved to different locations within the house. In nineteenth-century floor plans and house descriptions, rooms designated for sleep are called “chambers”; by the end of the century, and into the twentieth century, the appellation “bedroom” took hold. Much of the time, house floor plans lacked any particular specification about who should inhabit which bedroom. When children began to have rooms of their own, home-owning couples might reasonably have claimed the largest bedrooms for themselves. The rear of a nineteenth-century house contained a poorly ventilated and hot kitchen, a back door for merchant deliveries, perhaps entrances, stairways, and rooms for servants; children’s and infants’ room usually were located there. The front of the home—cleaner, airier, and quieter—enjoyed the highest status. Parents’ slept either right next to the parlor in a single-story home or right above it, as they could be trusted to maintain the quiet a genteel home required. House plans from the late nineteenth century show the biggest bedroom as only slightly larger than any other bedroom in the house, despite the fact it was a room particularly intended for two. Almost always it was located at the front of the house. A bed designed for multiple users (standardized bed size is a twentieth-century development) was still small by today’s standards. With socializing confined to other rooms, bedrooms used primarily for sleeping did not need to be very large; one might even justify larger bedrooms for children as they had less access to other parts of the house and needed the space for their play and the many playthings financially comfortable families could give them. Mothers kept infants in the same room with them until they were old enough to sleep separately (the age at which babies slept apart from mothers has steadily decreased over the last century) ⁸ ; sick children, too, might be set up in the parent’s room during illness and convalescence.

Shoppell’s Modern House from 1880s to 1900 contains floor plans for multistory (usually three) homes. Shoppell’s homes are big enough to contain both parlor and living room, often adding a library or den, usually with four or five bedrooms, a bathroom on the second floor, and servants’ staircases. Using the labels bedroom and chamber interchangeably, no bedroom is designated in the floor plan for the marital couple, nor in descriptions accompanying the illustrations, though bedrooms for servants are sometimes denoted. Some bedrooms in two-story houses, however, contain two closets; in those instances, it is always the biggest bedroom. And the largest bedroom occupies the front, sometimes on the side but rarely in the back. ⁹ Herbert Chivers’ 1910 Artistic Homes includes plans for more modest houses; some of them have chambers on the first floor, accessible via the living room, parlor, or sitting room (Chivers uses these terms interchangeably). Most of his homes lack hallways; getting to any room usually requires walking through another. Above the parlor/living room one will find the largest bedroom, usually, and in a one-story home the largest chamber sits closest to the parlor. Even more modest homes can be found in Rogers and Manson’s 1912 One Hundred Bungalows; here one can see chambers still accessible from a living or dining room, and no bedroom is designated for a particular dweller. ¹⁰

Sears’ catalog houses of the teens leave bedrooms unassigned in both floor plan and house descriptions. ¹¹ Biggest bedrooms, however, follow the pattern of being situated close to the front of the house. Bernard Wells Close edited, in 1922, a collection of eighty architect-built homes which provide a good indication of how the upper class lived. Most of the houses in his volume contain maids’ rooms and entries (out of favor in modest homes with the decline in the steady supply of inexpensive domestic labor). Sleeping rooms are designated alternately as chambers or bedrooms, depending on the architect; none are labeled master bedrooms but the term “owners [sic] bedroom” is quite common. Most of the owner’s bedrooms (or the largest bedrooms) have bathrooms attached, but, interestingly, not all. Some bathrooms are accessible from more than one bedroom. ¹²

The 1926 Sears’ catalog of homes occasionally refers to the “main” or “master’s” bedroom in copy, though not on the floor plans, even though drawings often show one bedroom significantly larger than the others and presumably better fitted for two occupants. ¹³ At nearly US$5,000, Sears’ “Glen Falls” model is the most expensive in its 1926 catalog. This Dutch colonial boasts many features: a den, a sunporch, and built-in kitchen cupboards. Most distinctive is the “master’s bedroom,” not merely spacious but containing a “private bath” within it; it is the only home in the sixty offered in the catalog with that amenity. Likewise, a 1929 book of 124 house plans shows only three houses—the Edgewater, the Clifton, and the Dryfork—with an extra bathroom accessible only through one, larger bedroom; these bedrooms carry no particular designation on their blueprint. ¹⁴ The same year, the Architects’ Small House Service Bureau published a compendium of 254 one-, two-, and three-bedroom homes. Only two of the single-story houses have bedrooms accessible only from a living or dining room; all other first floor bedrooms have a buffering hallway. Bedrooms are rarely designated for particular use, sometimes referred to an “owners [sic] bedroom” or “owner’s room” on the floor plan and occasionally called “double room” in accompanying text. Only two have attached bathrooms: one in a single-story home, which notes a “double bedroom with a bath opening from it” and another in a two-story house that has what later comes to be known as a half bath (sink and toilet only) accessible only through the biggest bedroom. In an era when Americans had not yet adopted daily bathing or hair washing, home buyers would not perceive a tubless bathroom as a deprivation.

Two-story homes, as most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homes were, solved the privacy problem with a staircase, but smaller homes often contained only one floor. (Many architects left generous attic space for future expansion; this was true even in many suburban homes built in the housing boom of the 1940s and 1950s). While two-story and one and a half-story bungalows existed, the early twentieth century saw an explosion of single-story bungalows across the first wave of American suburbs. California Bungalows of the Twenties (originally titled A Short Sketch of the Evolution of the Bungalow: From its Primitive Crudeness to its present state of Artistic Beauty and Cozy Convenience) contains seventy-five house designs, none of which designate a master or parents’ bedroom. Of the fifty single-story homes in the text, over half have bedrooms accessible directly from the living room, while a few more homes allow one to get to a bedroom through a dining room or entry hall. Very often, the bedrooms accessed via public rooms contain most square footage of any bedroom, while the smallest bedrooms reside at the back of the house, nearest to the kitchen. ¹⁵ We can assume, then, that these larger bedrooms, at the front of the house, would have been occupied by the marital couple.

Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century home architecture reflected the domestic ideology of its age, an ideology that emphasized the importance of parenting, mothering, and household organization. Home and house became more synonymous, each word conveying the same thing: a residence whose inhabitants love and care for each other, a place of nurturing, and a respite from the rest of the world. As Marsh noted in Suburban Lives, homes centered on gentle values: the natural innocence of children, wholesome leisure activities, motherly attention to the psychological and spiritual lives of their families, a new “science” of housekeeping and household management, and, in particular, a model of companionate marriage based on love and respect between spouses rather than the absolute authority of the husband or father. ¹⁶ A restorative home gained such social importance that historians have labeled the ideology a “cult of domesticity.” ¹⁷ Men and women inhabited separate spheres, the woman’s portion in the home; as such, the home’s sanctuary was particularly feminine and gentle, always the antidote to the rough masculinity of competitive capitalism and bustling city life. Houses enveloped their residents in warmth and protection.

Marriage was the first step toward the creation of that sanctuary; the couple serves as the foundational relationship of family life. Of course, that heterosexual couples would procreate went without saying: houses were for parents and children, occasionally grandparents, too. That parents would have their own room signified the special relationship between them but other “adult” spaces existed as well: particularly the parlor (eventually the living room), for evenings at home or with other adult company but also masculine “dens” or “studies” set aside for fathers, or kitchens, sewing or reading rooms which mother might make her own. Children did not have free range in these homes; their space was particularly designated, a bedroom or a playroom. They were frequently barred from adult rooms, like parlors or dining rooms, or permitted to be there only when accompanied by adults. A parents’ bedroom, then, was an intimate space (after all, the marital bed was located there and it would have been the only space for sanctioned sexual expression), but it was not the only space available to the couple. Clark notes “the lady of the house” would have some time to herself in her bedroom, reading, or sewing, but she would have had other quiet places for the same activities. ¹⁸ Modern American Homes, originally published in 1913, includes a number of modest homes with sewing rooms and dens. ¹⁹

Companionate marriage emphasized partnership between the members of a heterosexual couple as they shared the inevitable task of raising a family. Preserving traditional separate spheres for each gender, it elevated the centrality of the woman—the housewife—in home and family life. Motherhood developed to a nearly sacred status, as the jobs of child raising and household management gained new spiritual, psychological, and economic importance. Nineteenth-century homes reflected the importance of the feminine. The Victorian decor relied on soft upholstery, luxurious fabrics, and lacy curtains; in other words, a home had been intentionally feminized as counterpoint to the masculine world of economic competition which lay outside its walls.

A parents’ bedroom—in size, placement, and accessibility to other household residents—comported with a view of marriage and motherhood predominating in that era; Vollmer et al. describe the nineteenth-century parents’ room as the “hub of control” within the home. ²⁰ Proximity to children was essential; parents but particularly a mother should be constantly available to hear and attend to their children, even (and perhaps especially) at night. Mother would want her baby in its cradle just across the room, so she could feed it instantly. She would want to set up a cot for a sick child. While the parents’ bedroom would have a door, perhaps even a lock, it would be off-limits to guests but not inaccessible to other family members. Bedrooms would be near each other and fairly interchangeable as to who might occupy which room. Tandem rooms—as long as they were in the private part of the home—actually assisted a mother’s caretaking if she kept a child in a room adjacent to her own.

Courtship rituals and marriage advice of the nineteenth century affirm the idea that a good marriage should be based on respectful love and affection. Men and women ought to marry with their eyes open; they ought to thoughtfully choose the person they will live with until “death do them part.” Compatibility, similar values, and complementary temperaments: these would ground a marriage, stabilize it, and create a pairing best suited to the task of raising a family. The marital pair might have more equality between them than the patriarchal spouses of a previous age, and the status of women was certainly higher, but they shared with the patriarchal couple a certainty that marriage served as a precursor toward creating a family: people wed in order to have children and raise them. Parents needed a separate bedroom because they needed space for a marital bed and to find private space for conversing and being together. The health of their relationship, however—that they were agreeable to each other, supportive of each other, shared the values necessary for creating and sustaining a stable family—shaped the family overall. Adults who married in their twenties, bore children later in life, and died in their fifties or sixties could reasonably expect to devote most of their adult years to child-rearing. There was little to a married couple other than the reproductive enterprise; home architecture of the period reflected that.

Post–World War II Housing and Modern Marriage

In the second half of the twentieth century, we can see a change in both how marriage and family are perceived along with alterations in homes created to house those families. While social change tends to occur fairly slowly (the shift from patriarchal marriage to companionate marriage took a couple of centuries), in the twentieth-century American social change occurred quite rapidly; in particular, the constant construction of new homes reflected and still reflects new and frequently changing patterns of living. Not only the upper-class and some of the middle-class could aspire to homeownership; by the middle part of the twentieth century, even working-class families could own homes. Nearly unknown in the nineteenth century and still a rare amenity in the first half of the twentieth, the master suite—bedroom and bathroom—by the 1970s and 1980s had become standard in home building, and continues to be standard. This must-have room tells us much about contemporary couples.

As has been well documented, house construction stalled during the Great Depression and World War II, creating a pent up demand by the late 1940s. The American postwar baby boom exacerbated that demand; developers and builders responded with an unprecedented flurry of housing construction, nearly all of it single-family, suburban homes for middle-class families. While the post–World War II housing boom gets credit for a surge in suburban living, it followed some preexisting trends. Suburbs were not a new invention: the upper-class Americans began leaving cities for suburbs in the latter half of the nineteenth century, initially during summers and eventually year-round. An initial wave of middle-class suburban living occurred with the rise of “trolley” suburbs around the turn of the century, homes within the city limits but outside the city center, accessible by streetcars. Americans had already gravitated toward detached, single-family houses, which had become more available and affordable when large houses gave way to smaller ones. ²¹ By the 1920s, American bungalows had already encouraged, according to Clark, companionate marriage precisely because family members—including the marital couple—shared closer quarters. ²² Smaller homes, however, created some challenges. A room dedicated to formal and infrequent use—the parlor—had to go. Modest houses could not accommodate the specifically gendered and exclusive mother’s sewing room or father’s den. And no one wanted to be cramped; by the teens and twenties, builders had already replaced actual doors with open doorways and archways—between foyer and living room, between living room and dining room—that created easier movement from one room to another. ²³

A particular challenge for designers of small, one-story homes lay in how to separate public zones from private ones, a problem not found in two-story houses. This challenge grew even more significant in the post–World War II housing boom, which churned out millions of, comparably, very small one-story homes in American suburbs. Housing benefits for returning soldiers gave millions of young families financial incentives to buy, but the GI Bill restricted those benefits to housing meeting Federal Housing Authority (FHA) requirements. FHA mandated a price range of US$8,000 to US$10,000 and a size range of 800 to 1,000 square feet; houses built in 1950 were even smaller than those built in the previous thirty years. ²⁴ The average home built in the 1950s contained one floor, with two bedrooms and one bathroom; larger homes might have three bedrooms and one or two bathrooms, still contained on one floor. ²⁵

Builders of these smaller homes resorted to some tricks to make the smaller homes feel more spacious. Large picture windows and sliding glass patio doors drew the eye outdoors. Built-in cabinetry, for books, storage, appliances, and so on saved floor space. In particular, limiting or removing interior walls created an illusion of a bigger home, so home designers let living rooms flow into dining room/eating areas, which in turn flowed into kitchens. Whereas early twentieth-century architects used archways or doublewide doorways to open up a house, mid-century architects removed much of the walls altogether. Cape Cod cottages, the ranch, and the split-level: pretty much all new construction in the 1950s and 1960s followed this model. The open plan caught on and dominates home architecture to this day; in sharp contrast to the closed doors between each room of nineteenth-century homes, contemporary American houses have few doors, perhaps only to bathrooms and bedrooms. Even those who have older homes may remodel by removing walls and adapting to the open concept home, keeping the style of contiguous public space even while increasing the size of the house.

Bedrooms in the early mid-century two-bedroom houses, and many of the three-bedroom ones, shared a similar footprint, none particularly larger than another. Queen-sized and king-sized beds were not introduced until 1958; the couple’s room needed only a double bed or, perhaps, two twins. Rarely, in these modest homes, did an architect insert a bathroom specifically dedicated to the parents, either accessible through the parents’ bedroom or right next to it. (Even large, luxurious homes before the 1920s rarely contained what we now call a “master” bathroom.) Absent more space, and absent a blueprint designation as a “parents’ room,” parents could therefore assign bedrooms as they saw fit, and if they wanted to assign the larger/largest bedroom to, for example, their three sons who were sharing that seemed sensible enough.

When does the phrase master bedroom really take hold? Evolution of the term is hard to trace. Directory to the Apartments of the Better Class Along the North Side of Chicago, published in 1917, designates apartments with two, three, or four master rooms, bedrooms or chambers, which distinguishes those rooms from the smaller “maid’s” or “servant’s” rooms in another part of the residence. Clearly, master refers to occupying family members of all generations rather than a marital couple. ²⁶ For a long time, home sellers used multiple names, often simultaneously. Ideal Homes: Two-Story Houses, published circa 1933, refers to “owner’s chamber” or “owner’s room,” “larger bedroom” or master bedroom interchangeably, only in copy and never on the floor plans themselves. ²⁷ The Book of 100 Homes, in 1946, contains blueprints for modest one-, two-, and three-bedroom homes; house descriptions usually refer to the “owner’s bedroom” but sometimes use “main,” master or master’s, and, in one example, labels a master bedroom directly on the floor plan itself. Harold E. Group’s House-of-the-Month Book of Small Houses that same year provided a selection of one-, two-, and three-bedroom homes. The volume’s audience may be discerned by the addition of a “G.I. Bill of Rights,” which outlines the housing benefit available to any honorably discharged World War II veteran. Although floor plans merely reflect bedrooms number one, two, or three, adjoining text uses, consistently and exclusively, the term master bedroom. Even several of the two-bedroom houses denote a master bedroom, and four houses have a master bedroom with adjoining bath, called “private” bath. ²⁸ Although catalog homes largely disappeared by the 1950s, consumers could still find books of house plans, and they, too, tell the story: by the 1980s, master bedrooms with attached, private bathrooms were standard. Color Portfolio of Houses & Plans offered blueprints for sale in 1987, and every one- and two-story design contains a master suite. ²⁹ In the Encyclopedia of Home Designs: 500 House Plans offered by Home Planners, Inc., in 1992, only three of the most modest houses (ranging from 1,176 to 1, 208 square feet) have no master bathroom, though all the other similarly sized homes do. ³⁰ A 2003 Reader’s Digest publication, One-Story Home Plans, never failed to supply a master suite, often with an adjacent sitting area. ³¹

Whatever the appellation, the concept is clear: the couple ought to have dedicated space, separate and distinct from the rest of the home. That dedicated space has grown in size and importance in the last sixty years. In particular, the master bedroom’s place of sanctuary has come to dominate our understanding of how that space is meant to function within the home as a whole. A nineteenth-century home provided a Christian, feminine haven against masculine competition and urbanity, a soft-space buffered by gentle love and care. Home-sweet-home provided sanctuary in a harsh world; it restored moral order. But in the mid-twentieth-century, a private home supplied a nuclear family a space not for moral sanctity but familial privacy. The post–World War II housing crisis meant many young families doubled up or shared with in-laws, subject to the sounds and smells and judgments of neighbors and housemates. A late nineteenth-century home supplied protection and safety from outsiders; a mid-century home let a family have independence from neighbors and relatives. ³² A young family could be left alone. Baby boom parents, the primary purchasers of these small but open homes, were advised that the new home facilitated “togetherness,” a rising notion in the postwar years. If the nineteenth-century home—with a gentle, loving mother at the center—provided a moral and nurturing haven from the dirty, busy, noisy, competitive life outside of it, the mid-twentieth-century home—with a gentle, loving mother at the center—emphasized the bonds of the private, nuclear family. Homes should be for mothers teaching their daughters to bake cookies, for fathers to throw a ball to sons, for families to share backyard barbeques and board games. A home is for recreation and relaxing. ³³ An open-plan house brought everyone together: the backyard is easily observable from the kitchen or family room; the kitchen flows into the dining room (or, in the smallest homes, the eating area). As mid-century parents had slightly more children than their predecessors, and had them in quicker succession, the family-friendly home made sense, and so the housing boom followed the baby boom.

But privacy so easily gained for the family overall proved elusive for the individuals within it, in particular women and the marital couple. Open-plan design renders difficult, if not impossible, the restriction of visitors or even residents from any part of the house other than bedrooms and bathrooms. Nineteenth-century parents could use doors and walls to enforce rules about who could go where: guests in the parlor, children barred from dining room or kitchen, and so on. But twentieth-century houses, particularly those built in the second half, pose a challenge: Where does kitchen end and family room begin? Where does entry hall end and living room begin? Every resident, including children, enjoyed nearly total access to the entire house. Jacobs’ treatment of American mid-century family rooms suggests that traditional age segregation within the home had become irrelevant with new architecture. ³⁴ Add to that the child-centered lives of the American baby boom generation, who were freer than their parents and grandparents not only to be seen and heard but also to set up their many toys and play activities anywhere in the house. If everyone had the run of the entire house, then adults had less and less space to mark as their own exclusive domain. The adults-only parlor, expensive in terms of real estate and thus considered expendable, turned out to serve an important purpose for adult life.

Critics of open-plan homes noted the lack of solitude and privacy adults but particularly for the stay-at-home mother; as early as 1963, Betty Friedan complained in The Feminine Mystique that the lack of doors robbed the housewife of any privacy. ³⁵ Chermayeff and Alexander noted, also in 1963, the modern world’s assault on privacy: “the housewife, or mother, for whom the suburb was intended, has become its greatest victim” because of her isolation from adult social life. ³⁶ The window over the kitchen sink allows her to watch children playing in the backyard and a family room adjacent to the kitchen allows her to monitor homework and activities, but just as she can always see, she can always be seen. Where might she find relief from this panopticon? Her bedroom, where she can close the door and lie down for a nap or read a magazine? Or, in a bathroom, where a tubful of bubbles serves as escape? (“Take me away,” she exclaims, as she sinks into the bath.) Bedrooms and bathrooms might well be the only rooms with doors, certainly with lockable doors. If the home is sanctuary, where does one find a haven within it? Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class mothers could sit in a parlor with a door closed, retreat to their sewing nooks, or even work alone in their kitchens. Twentieth-century homes lack those rooms or doors to them. As well, where could the marital couple be alone together? No longer in the parlor or the dining room. An open home has no private, adult space other than the parents’ bedroom.

Despite these drawbacks, Americans took to the ease and practicality of the open plan and found a way to carve out privacy in such a residence. Not by chance, then, did the rise and popularity of the open concept home coincide with the rise of the master bedroom as we now know it. Postwar housing design began the practice of indicating the master bedroom as a distinctive room; with public rooms at the front of the house, the married couple got prime real estate in the back of the house, and/or to the side (kitchens no longer generate heat and smells, thanks to modern insulation and ventilation, and grocery stores replaced noisy delivery men and servants). Even in a two-story home, parents got the back of the house, as the need to keep things quiet for the guests became obsolete when the stiffly formal parlor morphed into the easier, informal living room (and eventually into the “family” room). Parents earned the quietest spot, away from the street and the noise of family life. The bigger the home, the greater the buffer between the children and parents, and parents moved to the edges, the corners, and the ends of corridors, making the master bedroom the least accessible room of the home. Eventually, that master space included a designated master bathroom, either right next to it or, even better, accessible only by going through the bedroom. In the last fifty years, the marital bed itself has grown, from a double, to a queen, to a king, to even a California king; a bedroom needs to be large enough to accommodate the bigger bed. The square footage of American homes has soared in the last four decades, not because houses have more rooms but because rooms are bigger; the master suite’s expansion accounts for much of that additional square footage.

Despite the terminology, the master bedroom was either presented to homeowners as couple space or, if explicitly gendered, more feminine than masculine space. Likely the label indicated the room’s size more than anything; it was clearly designed for the marital couple. As did the old parents’ room, it contained the marital bed, the site, of course, of procreation. But as the only “couple” space in the home, it takes on new meaning. No longer is the couple viewed solely as parents. The couple—the marriage—is an entity of itself, deserving of its own place apart from the rest of the family. Chermayeff and Alexander in 1963 criticized any blueprint that omitted a buffering space between parents’ room and children’s bedrooms. ³⁷ Baby boom parents experienced a conflict with family togetherness: with several children spaced close together, finding time for just themselves turned out to be pretty tough, just at the historical moment when Americans viewed private time as increasingly necessary to nurture and sustain the marital relationship.

Marriages made in the 1950s and 1960s were predicated on romance. Unlike nineteenth-century suitors, who “called” on potential partners in their sitting rooms and parlors in full view of their elders, by the mid-twentieth-century couples courted by dating, forsaking parlors for movies, arcades, diners, skating rinks, and bowling alleys. Courtship required at least some privacy for the couple to determine their compatibility, similar interests, and, of course, sexual attraction. They married young, perhaps having been sexually active before marriage and still sexually vibrant after it, and they ceased having children at relatively young ages, too. Their children would grow up and leave parents behind, so a passionate marriage was worth preserving. Dr. Spock, to whom parents reflexively turned for parenting advice, suggested moving infants to their own rooms no later than six months, by which age they might become disturbed by parental intercourse. ³⁸ As early as 1970, Yale sociologist John Sirjamaki noted marriage had shifted from an institution mainly for economic survival to one with higher standards: happiness and companionship. ³⁹ Historians, sociologists, and psychologists since then only affirm that assessment: marriage, starting in the second half the twentieth century, is a more fluid institution, about personal fulfillment and pleasure, finding happiness with another person. ⁴⁰

Although some date the baby boom as ending in the early 1960s, the birth rate began to slow in 1957, ⁴¹ and the 1960s saw a steady decline in family size. The young marriages and closely spaced children of the 1950s turn out to have been a historical anomaly. But the marital ethos—that one finds personal fulfillment in being part of a couple—of the boom generation’s parents has only continued. Premarital sex, cohabitation before marriage, delayed wedlock, delayed childbirth, nonmarital births, easy divorce, and even extension of marriage to same-sex couples indicate the primacy of sexual satisfaction as fundamental aspect of human life and therefore part of a fulfilling marriage or couple. Declining birth rates and increased life expectancy shrink the proportion of years adults spend parenting; individuals and couples spend more years not child-raising than ever before. If the nineteenth-century home served the companion couple, who united for the shared task of the child raising that would occupy the bulk of their lives, the twentieth- and twenty-first century homes serve the fulfillment couple, a stand-alone entity existing both prior to and after the child-rearing enterprise.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the master bedroom’s role as sanctuary was no longer implied but fully stated. Its presence contributed to the supersized homes of the latter end of the twentieth century; Hayden notes separating parents and children into separate wings particularly bumped up square footage in ever-increasing house size. ⁴² Now often called by home developers the “owner’s retreat,” the master suite signals that the space serves not only straight but gay couples or (note the placement of the apostrophe) maybe not a couple at all. More important than the updated, nongendered terminology (this change has not caught on in contemporary vernacular: master bedroom and master suite are yet the most common terms for this space) is the conception of the space as a sanctuary or retreat, a label that very much dominates the discourse in home decor and design literature. The retreat is now enormous, taking up to one-third to one-half of the floor it occupies. ⁴³ Enlarged master suites accommodate ever-growing bed size; great grandmother made do with a double bed but eventually couples adopted queen-sized beds, then kings, then California kings. Perhaps larger beds facilitate a creative, energetic sex life. But with or without expansive square footage, American homes have master bedrooms. The Big Book of Small House Designs, published in 2004 and containing no house plan over 1,250 square feet (the average American home built in the last two decades is over twice that size) dedicates a master bedroom in half of its plans, and half of those contain a private bathroom. ⁴⁴ Compact Houses in 2013 offered buyers homes with fewer than 1,400 square feet and many have master suites. Even the two-bedroom “off-the-grid pole barn” and “passive solar stone” houses give environmentally conscious owners master suites. ⁴⁵ The master suite expectation extends today to buyers of townhomes, row houses, coops and condominiums, even to apartment renters.

Master bedrooms also enjoy significant buffering from the rest of the home. Modern technology, having supplied parents with audio and video monitoring of young children, mean proximity to children is virtual rather than physical; even infants can be far away if an attentive parent checks the baby monitor. In a multistory home, the owner’s retreat is now quite often on the first floor, while children’s bedrooms are on the second floor, further separating parents and their children. In single-story homes, long corridors distance the generations, or the master suite sits on one side of the house and children’s bedrooms on another, with public rooms in between. Again, this is meaningful reflection on the status of modern coupledom. Marriage must be nurtured, with privacy and private space. As the couple is a separate part of the family, it must occupy a separate part of the family home.

Sanctuary is found, too, in the luxury home designers supply. Magazines, advertisements, and home decor and renovation television shows and websites highlight the pampering that can take place in a capacious and luxurious retreat. A 1960s housewife settled for a capful of bubble bath to take her away, very likely in the same bathtub her children used, but in 2010 her daughter—who has a much bigger house—enjoys steam showers, deep soaking tubs, radiant floor heating, granite counters, rainfall shower heads, and romantic skylights, and she has them all to herself. No longer a “housewife” but a “working mother” or a “stay at home mom,” she—with or without a husband or partner—has earned not just privacy but a full spa treatment, every day, in her bathroom. (Whether busy Americans have the time to use these amenities is beside the point.)

In addition to the size, placement, and luxury of the suite, the owner’s retreat reflects that the members of the couple are individuals, too. Chernin, in The Marriage-Go-Round, sees a model of contemporary marriage that he dates as early as 1960: the “individualized marriage” that contrasts the couple against the individual members of it. The early master bedrooms highlighted the necessity of the couple to have privacy against the rest of the family and the home; but by the end of the twentieth century, master suites must not only serve that couple’s needs but also acknowledge the individuals within the pair. And the most recent master suites do just that: not one but two walk-in closets so that neither has to share storage or dressing space, two sinks/vanities/medicine cabinets so each occupant can have separate amenities, a separate shower and a tub, and, quite often, a toilet that within the master bathroom is sectioned off into its own room with a closeable door (for the couple who does not wish to share everything). If we once wanted to make sure the couple could get away from the rest of the family, through the inclusion of a master bedroom, now we must arrange for the couple, in that same space, to get away from each other.

One recent trend, albeit a small one, is houses designed with two master suites. Often these are promoted as beneficial for aging parents, boomerang adult children, nonkin house co-owners, guests, caregivers, or employees. (For now, homes offering this amenity come only for the upper income brackets.) Americans’ reliance on personal privacy, the trend for adult children to move back in with parents, or, never leave in the first place, makes multiple masters practical, if expensive. But some acknowledge that married couples themselves might prefer separate quarters. In 2007, The New York Times noted the trend, citing the National Association of Home Builders’ prediction that 60 percent of custom homes would have two master suites by 2015. ⁴⁶ A few builders admitted that as many of 25 percent of their homes already had two master suites, and while often these were often very obviously his and her suites, stigma about married couples sleeping apart necessitated a fig leaf, calling the second master an “in-law suite” or “flex-suite.” But Design Basics wonders if you “suffer from a spouse whose snoring can be heard in the next county or have varying sleep requirement;” would you then prefer to sleep apart? ⁴⁷ Stanton Homes in 2008 announced, in their promotion of two master suites, “couples find that time alone creates better time together.” ⁴⁸ Bedroom historian Cromley quipped “one of the things you may lose upon marriage is a room of your own.” ⁴⁹ Perhaps the next evolution of home design, however, will accommodate couples whose desire for privacy within marriage requires separate bedrooms.

It must be noted that the twenty-first century has seen a steep decline in marriage rates overall, with some seeing marriage as an optional or even outmoded institution. Many families do not have a marital couple at the center. Upper-middle and upper-class Americans are still, however, getting married and staying married and of course they are also most likely to have the resources to buy homes, thus driving the housing standards we have seen and will continue to see. For them, the hub of the home is no longer the marital bedroom, as noted by Vollmer et al. in their assessment of nineteenth-century architecture; contemporary Americans view kitchens as the command centers of homes. But for couples—with or without children, without or without marriage—the master suite is the location of intimacy and privacy, a place necessary for enriching a fulfilling and happy relationship together.