This week I was in Chicago for a job interview and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago. Among other things, I saw the “Thorne Miniature Rooms” – http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne/index.php – a set of miniature interiors of rooms in (presumably) upper-class home in Europe and the U.S. (plus a couple from China and Japan) from the Tudor period to the 1930s. I noted that some rooms were labeled “salons,” some “parlors,” some “sitting rooms,” some “drawing rooms” – and I couldn’t really tell any difference, any defining characteristics that would seem to warrant the application of these different names. I also saw a couple of “boudoirs.” I thought “boudoir” was another word for a bedroom, but in these rooms there were no beds. (There were also several “libraries,” which appeared indistinguishable from the other rooms except for the presence of a couple of bookcases and writing-desks.) What exactly is the difference between a “drawing room,” “parlor,” etc.?
I think the answer is “social class.” Only the upper class had drawing rooms, to which one would “withdraw” after dinner. Salons and parlors would seem to me to be indistinguishable, except it’s my impression that in the past, either “salon” or “parlor” would be held by somebody to be a vulgar term (though I think maybe a “salon” would be a public receiving room in a high-class household). “Sitting room” again is an upper-class term for a room where the ladies would sit during the day, doing their needlework, I guess.
“Boudoir” is a room off a bedroom, where an upper-class woman might have a couch and maybe a toilet table. “Boudoir” comes from the French “bouder,” to sulk. So I guess it’s where ladies went to sulk when they didn’t feel like going all the way to bed.
I do not know the precise differences between many of these rooms, but I did once read that Jane Austen was the master of knowing which was which and implying lots of things about the characters that owned them, just by the names. Incidentally, in her books, the very large sitting rooms of very grand houses are sometimes called “saloons.”
I think that a drawing room is a sitting room especially for ladies, and usually on the second floor. Its name does come from “withdrawing room,” originally a sitting room separate from the main Hall in Elizabethan houses.
A sitting room did not have to be upper-class; it is simply the word for “living room” or “family room”–the room where people did everything.
A salon meaning a group of intellectuals who have nothing better to do than drink coffee and argue, and a salon meaning a kind of room, are different things. I suspect that a salon and a saloon are the same thing… but I will have to research it.
Finally, a parlor is, I believe, a low-class “gussied up” term for a sitting room. In Emma, Harriet says that her farmer friends have “two parlors… two very good parlors.”
All of this is stated with reservation and without research–though I am DEFINITELY going to look into this!
I do not know the precise differences between many of these rooms, but I did once read that Jane Austen was the master of knowing which was which and implying lots of things about the characters that owned them, just by the names. Incidentally, in her books, the very large sitting rooms of very grand houses are sometimes called “saloons.”
I think that a drawing room is a sitting room especially for ladies, and usually not on the ground floor. Its name does come from “withdrawing room,” originally a sitting room separate from the main Hall in Elizabethan houses.
A sitting room did not have to be upper-class; it is simply the word for “living room” or “family room”–the room where people did everything.
A salon meaning a group of intellectuals who have nothing better to do than drink coffee and argue, and a salon meaning a kind of room, are different things. I suspect that a salon and a saloon are the same thing… but I will have to research it.
Finally, a parlor is, I believe, a low-class “gussied up” term for a sitting room. In Emma, Harriet says that her farmer friends have “two parlors… two very good parlors.”
All of this is stated with reservation and without research–though I am DEFINITELY going to look into this!
Cursory investigation at dictionary.com indicates:
A sitting room is an informal place for the family to spend their time.
A drawing room is a formal place to meet visitors.
A salo(o)n is a very large room capable of handling public exhibitions, balls, etc.
A parlo(u)r is a small private room where people can have some privacy.
[Catherwood] You may sit here it the waiting room…
or wait here in the sitting room… [/Catherwood]
Following dinner, upper-class ladies withdrew to the (with)drawing room, while the gentlemen went for cigars and conversation to the parlor (from parler). A salon was specifically for entertaining company; use of the other rooms might suggest a more intimate relationship than invited guest. (In a mansion with a salon, an invitation to join the host/-ess in the parlor implied a closer friendship than those invited to a soirée held in the salon.)
There really isn’t much difference…at least between parlor and drawing room. Parlor is a term used in the US, while drawing room was a term used in Europe.
If you stick around here, you’ll find that people often ask posters to defend dubious, inaccurate, ridiculous, or just plain wrong statements with a citation by some recognized authority.
Cite?
It took 10 years to come up with that WAG?
I guess that this has been answered by now. I call the main room in the house the living room and my wife calls it the sitting room. My young son, who can’t decide between the two, has now started calling it the sieving room 
A parlour was, in mediaeval times (when a lot of life was lived communally), a room for private conversations (for the upper crust, naturally). But by Victorian times in Britain and Ireland, it would be used as meaning the “best” room for visitors, in lower class homes, often the front room on the ground floor, and definitely not to be used as an everyday sitting-room. If you could afford it, that’s where you put the piano, the aspidistra and the anti-macassars, and kept it neat and tidy in case anyone came to call. Hence the old music-hall songs “If you’re Irish, come into the parlour” and " When Father papered the parlour".
Middle and upper middles would have a drawing-room one floor up.
Not much used now that room uses themselves have changed, what with open-plan living/kitchen/diner/sitting spaces and so on.
On HGTV I was stunned to see a home resto that had a boudoir. They defined a boudoir as a sitting room connected to a bedroom, typically getting to the bedroom was only do-able by passing thru the boudoir. Considered part of the bedroom in terms of private space, so not just anyone would be welcome in there. The surprise was that, the way the explained it, the term made sense in how I’ve heard it used. Could be wrong though.
For what little it’s worth, my aged MIL refers to what the rest of us call the living room or great room as the parlor. Hers or anyone else’s, be it grand or humble.
For awhile I had a McMansion with 3 similar rooms: formal living room, converted basement TV/rec room & converted basement bar room. Only the first of these rated “parlor” in her terminology.
She now fancies herself a middle-upper crust proper New Englander from the very early 20th century. With pretensions to be Edwardian; IOW ~20 years before she was born, much less raised. She is actually a New Englander, but born here to peasant immigrants (non-British) who worked hard with their hands.
So I’m not sure if parlor is authentic usage from her childhood, or an affectation she’s nurtured for 80 years since first reading Jane Austen. She has quite a few of those. She’s so cute in her idiosyncrasies.
Some Irish homes, especially rural ones still have this, often referred to as just “the room” or the good room" although it seems to be less common than it once was.
“Home resto”?
“HGTV”? Home&Garden TV (cable network)?
Home restoration
Yes
Well, bedrooms themselves were associated with sex in Victorian times, and couches were initially seen as a titillating furniture piece because they were a bit like beds. Before they came along everyone sat on wooden chairs.
It seems to me that the modern equivalents to sitting room, drawing room, and parlor (in broad strokes) would be family room, living room, and den. The living room is usually more formal than the family room. If you have company over, you take them to the living room; if you’re going to sit on the couch and watch TV while eating last night’s cold pizza, you’re gonna do it in the family room. A den, like a parlor, usually comes with the expectation of a small degree of privacy.
I wonder if you could tell what kind of room you were in by what you were sitting on. I.e. davenport, settee, couch, sofa, divan. chaise longue (that’s be the boudoir I’ll bet). I think the settee is in the parlor, the davenport is in the salon, the sofa’s in the sitting room, and the couch is in the drawing room, but that’s just a guess.