I live in a traditional 1950s 3-bedroom ranch house. It would have been fairly easy to make the two smaller bedrooms the same size, except for the fact that they need closets. The builder put an 8’ closet in a 12’ bedroom, leaving a 4’ notch on one side, which is where you put either a dresser, bookcase or one end of a twin bed.
Now the other bedroom also gets an 8’ closet, but the other 4’ is used for the living room foyer closet (which in other house layouts would be the “hall” closet). Everything fits together like a Tetris puzzle, but the third bedroom ends up with less square footage and you end up having to put a bed in one corner.
My current house is like that; built about 25-30 years ago. There’s a decent sized master bedroom, a smaller guest room and a third yet smaller room that was advertised as “could be used as a bedroom”.
The house I grew up in was built by my grandfather for 3 people. The attic (unheated) was converted into 2 bedrooms - my 3 brothers had one and my sister and I had the other. My mother had the bedroom downstairs. One bathroom with a bathtub, no shower. We were highly coordinated in the mornings.
finished off our lower level…you know the kind that becomes the ‘rec room’ or divided into a couple of rooms with storage.
nope…pretty much the whole damn thing became our master bedroom. 600+ square feet, with a fireplace. It was originally 900 square feet but we put in a bathroom and the wifes sewing room.
We live in a neighborhood of houses built in the 1920s, which all have that pattern, 3 bedrooms with the master just big enough for a queen and definitely not big enough for a king, the second a bit crowded with a full sized bed and the third one just big enough for a twin bed, desk and bookshelf.
In my neighborhood, all ranch houses from the 1960s, and the master is like 10x10 with the other 2 rooms about 9x10.
My dad grew up in a 1940s bungalow in a different town, and he tells me that there were 2 bedrooms on the main floor, about the same size. Then the attic was just basically a big empty space that his father partitioned into a typical-sized room and then a very small room. My dad was the oldest but he enjoyed the very small room so he claimed that.