Having just endured the less-than-comfy bed at my inlaws’, I began to reflect on the relative sizes of bedrooms in places we have lived or visited. Pretty much all of them have been 3-bedroom houses.
It always seems that there’s a spacious master bedroom, a decent sized second bedroom, and a barely-above-a-walk-in-closet 3rd bedroom (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.) I understand having a larger master, but why aren’t the other 2 bedrooms about the same size? Any builders or architects here who can made this make sense?
I don’t know if that’s always the case. How old are these houses? I live in a ranch from 1960, and the three bedrooms are pretty close in size. The master has two closets and a bathroom is all.
Ages are all over the place. My childhood home was built in the early 50s, one place we owned was built in the late 60s, we built one in the early 90s, and our current house was built in ‘75. My inlaws’ house was built in 2000, my mom’s house was built in the 60s. Two are in the same county but some are in Florida, some in Maryland. And while the place where we lived in Virginia had large bedrooms, they varied significantly in size.
I don’t know if it’s a regional thing, or something else, but my personal data points led to the question.
My house, built in 1959, had a large master bedroom, a largish second bedroom (About the same size as the master, sans bathroom), and a smaller third bedroom. I think the idea at the time was that you put your girl children in one of those, and your boy children in the other, and the odds are you had more of one sex. You’d have to drastically reconfigure the house to make the two “kid” bedrooms similar in size, so some of it may just be about how stuff fits together.
My house has since been expanded to have an even larger master bedroom in what used to be the attic. We now use the original master bedroom as a library, game room, and guest bedroom.
I have four bedrooms in my tall, skinny townhouse. The master bedroom is about 12 ft sq and accommodates a queen-sized bed. The others are all strangely long and narrow, 9 x 10 or 12, and oddly shaped so they don’t seem designed to hold a bed and other furniture.
I used to have a futon sofa in the one I use as a study, but if it was pulled open you had to climb over it to get into the room and it blocked the closet door. There is a twin bed with a pull-out trundle in the guest room, but again that takes up the whole room if I have more than one guest. (The other I just use for storage and for the cats’ playroom.)
The house was built in the late 70s. Most of my neighbors have families in similar houses, and I always think they must feel crowded when everyone’s at home.
I live in an 1880s terrace, with 3 bedrooms - one large master, one small bed which would have been medium sized except at some point they stole some of it to install a bathroom, and one other small bed.
I presume it’s because it’s assumed houses are occupied by families, and children, occupying a room on their own, don’t need a large bedroom.
I feel your pain at staying with the in-laws. I’m just heading off for a night at my parents, who downsized to a 2 bed apartment a few years ago, so myself and my wife (and dog) will be squashing up into two remarkably small single beds. My wife is less than happy at the prospect.
It’s fairly common in UK houses, in my experience- common enough that the little bedroom has a name, the ‘box room’. As a kid, I lived in two different 3 bed houses with that pattern (plus one that was similar, but the second larger bedroom was a loft conversion, the original design was just one big one little bedroom).
One of those, and a lot of my friends’ houses, were former council houses, and all had almost exactly the same layout, with one bathroom, approximately the same size as the box room, plus two bigger bedrooms.
I think a large part of the reasoning was that it’s quite a simple layout to fit together, being almost symmetrical with stairs in the centre, the two big rooms usually at the front and the landing and two little rooms (bed and bath) at the rear. Plus it’s suitable for the commonest family sizes of one, two or three children without being too cramped or having much wasted space, which would be important in the cheap-as-possible postwar building boom.
I was the younger child, guess which bedroom I always had?
When we built our house in the late 90s, I decided I didn’t need an overlarge master. Wasted space in my insomniac thinking. So all 4 of our bedrooms are of similar sizes. Now we’re empty nesters. All these rooms just give me headaches. It’s nice when they are filled with visiting kids and grandkids. But otherwise of no use. They tend to accumulate my various storage needs. With doors shut I forget to keep them tidy.
I have kept comfortable beds in them, though.
The lil’wrekkers room is as she left it, I can’t bear to change it, yet.
My childhood home was a 1000 sq ft row house (we didn’t call them townhouses back then.) The master was maybe 16X10, the room I shared with my sister was about 9X9, and the room my youngest sisters shared was roughly 6X9. Dad built a room for my brother in the basement.
Now THAT was cozy living. Oh yeah, and just one bathroom for 7 people. Good times! :eek:
The house I grew up in was built in 1951 (like me) and had a larger master bedroom (no bath) and two more or less equally sized bedrooms.
The house I live in now was built around 1953 and originally had three more or less equal sized bedrooms, but got expanded into a master bedroom with bath, an extra bedroom, and the third original bedroom was expanded into an office. The new bedroom was tiny and I expanded it into their Mormon storage room to be a nice sized office.
Master bedrooms in the early 1950s didn’t have baths, unless they were mansions I suppose. None of my friends’ parents had one.
Our houses have always been working class and 1950 construction or earlier; not one bedroom, even the Master, could be called spacious. With a full or queen bed and basic dressers and the like you can barely have a path (U shaped) to get from one side to the other. One at a time and one way travel at a time. The spacious thing you speak of is something we only saw in magazines and some of the newly made homes TNG have been buying.
Our last home, a townhouse, had a huge master (15x20?) with wall-length closets, and large enough for king sleigh bed, a dresser and a chest of drawers and end tables. Also had a master bath. The other bedrooms were probably 12x12. Our current place fits our king without the large frame, leaving just enough room to walk past the bottom of it, two small end tables, and a tiny closet. No bath. The other two are large enough for a child’s bedroom.
Our house was built in the 1930s, and has a large master bedroom, a medium one and a smaller one. The large and small bedrooms are devoted to computers and my art projects*, while the medium one is our bedroom, with a king-sized bed and room to spare.
*If I weren’t an artist, we’d have so much more room in this house. My parents were both artists, and we have lots of their art work too.
this is interesting. I got in a discussion with some guys from my job recently. They were all married and their wives insisted on large master bedrooms in their homes. with smaller 2nd and 3rd bedrooms.
Two of the guys had no kids and the thought was if their significant others died or left them they would use the 2nd bedroom as their actual bedroom and convert the large master bedroom as a work area/den.
My parents house had three bedrooms. My parents was on the first floor, and my two brothers and I had bedrooms on the second floor (my brothers shared a room, the biggest bedroom in the house.
My current house has two. The larger one is for us, and the smaller was our daughters. We originally had the smaller one, but we moved because the smaller one was warmer for the baby.
Current house is a converted barn, and just has one big area upstairs with a separate bathroom. Last house was about a hundred years old and had one slightly larger bedroom, about 12x10 and two smaller bedrooms, about 10x10. My kingsize bed took up most of the space in the master and I ended up using one of the other bedrooms as a walk-in closet and sewing room.
