While watching TV last night, I noticed a kitchen with a double-hung sash window that opened to the living room during Mad Men. I saw the same thing in a episode of Boardwalk Empire. Both buildings were much older - built at the turn of the century perhaps? At first I thought it might have been a closed in porch but that obviously wasn’t the case.
Was this some type of cool interior design feature? Did it serve some utility? Seems odd to me.
additional ventilation when needed, isolation when desired.
they could also be used as a pass-through for food to the living room.
Every time I have seen a window like this in a house, including the one I grew up in, it was in what had formerly been an exterior wall, the result of enclosing a porch or putting on an addition.
That’s what I felt, but in both instances that was obviously not the case.
In those days it was considered low-class for the smells of cooking to enter the rest of the house. Having a window there allowed the lady of the house to open it when there were no guests and supervise kids or chat wiht her husband or pass dishes through from the TV trays. She woudl close it when formal company arrived to avoid them actualy smelling the dinner.
I can still hear my Great-Aunt with her scathing compliment: “Dinner smells wonderful, my Dear!”
I’m curious about what made this obvious.
I would think this would be the serving window - the equivalent of a dumbwaiter in a single-storey kitchen-dining - for serving food. Most likely the route from kitchen to living room was a round-about one through a central hall, in the days when the kitchen was for the help. Of course, in a smaller house, this would be a pretension to make the place seem more hoity-toity.
Perhaps the later tendency was to replace the wood in the frames with glass when the help became a thing of the past and the wife wanted to be part of the group while working in the kitchen?
RE: Utility window
According to Steven Wright, it’s preferred among people born by Cesarean section.
I lived in a Queen Anne victorian that had a double hung window in the servants bathroom on both second and first [US] floors that led to a shaft that went to the laundry room in the basement. I always figured out that one did ones chores and dropped the laundry down for ease rather than lug bed linens and towels down stairs.
Loved the house. Nothing like a servants day room with closets and drawers for uniforms! Well, the butlers pantry between the kitchen and dining room was also fun, it had a little hutch in the outside wall for deliveries, we used it as a cat door =)
We have a window like that in our house, it is the result of an addition being built at some point.
“In those days it was considered low-class for the smells of cooking to enter the rest of the house. Having a window there allowed the lady of the house to open it when there were no guests and supervise kids or chat wiht her husband or pass dishes through from the TV trays. She woudl close it when formal company arrived to avoid them actualy smelling the dinner.”
This sounds nonsensensical to me. “Those days” being the turn of the 20th century? probably not a lot of “pass[ing] dishes through from the TV trays” in “those days”. Do you have a source?
No one has asked what to me is an obvious question - where, in relation to window to living room, is kitchen doorway into house, (I assume living room, but whose living room is adjacent to kitchen?
Some years ago I was overnighting in Tilbury Fort and noticed a window in the corridor of the (probably 18th c.) house I was sleeping in - provided daylight on the corridor via the front room, in an age before gas or electric lighting.
In all the purposes theorized here, there really is no need for a double hung window.
Disclaimer, I lived in house with interior double hung window, but indeed that was between original and addition.addition
I have windows between my living room and my (not originally) enclosed porch , but I’ve also seen apartments without an interior hallway with windows between two rooms that were both being used as bedrooms (although they may not have been intended to be bedrooms- I’ve seen plenty of living rooms and bedrooms next to kitchens) I think it was to let light into the middle room, which had no other windows.
When/where was this common? I grew up in the '60s (when Mad Men is set, no?) and never encountered such a thing.
RE: the OP, my childhood home had double-hung windows between the heated portion of the house and the unheated (but fully enclosed) porches. That house was built in the early 20th century. In the summer the windows could be opened into the house for ventilation and cooling.
When I was in high school, the office of one of the gym teachers had a window overlooking the boys’ shower. :eek: [insert double-hung joke]
“Those days” being the 50’s and 60’s and the source, as mentioned, being my Great Aunt. But also my Grandmother, and Mother, who had doors installed in the three opening that led from our kitchen to the Den, the Living room, and the Dining Room.
What is now called “Flow” was to them a dead giveaway that the house lacked servants.:rolleyes: