I’m sitting here trying to find something to write about for a class and in the background yet another annoying couple is looking at houses on House Hunters. Try as I might to not pay attention (she squeaks - why do grown women feel the need to be squeaky?), I can’t help but watch as they discuss master bedrooms.
Now, my house has 2 bedrooms and they’re the exact same size. They’re big enough for a bureau, 2 bedside tables, a queen size bed, a dog crate, and plenty of walking space. We could easily put a king size bed in there. This is the biggest bedroom I’ve ever had.
My bedroom is about the size of the rooms that so many people on this show insist is TOO SMALL to even be a guest bedroom.
I can understand wanting larger rooms for kids since they generally have lots of toys and frequently more than 2 inhabitants.
But, what is the obsession with a huge master bedroom? I can’t think of any reason I would need a bedroom big enough for an office (when the house has an office), a sitting area (when the house has a living room), and vast amounts of empty space. It seems like a massive waste of floorspace to me.
Don’t most people just sleep in their bedrooms? Other than sleep, getting dressed, and sex, I really don’t do anything else in my bedroom. What the hell are people doing in their bedroom that they need so much space?
Now, before anyone gets mad at me for putting down big bedrooms or thinks I’m being high and mighty, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it for YOU. I just don’t understand it and want to be enlightened.
Nah… dungeons are a staple, of course, but there’s also the schoolroom, the jungle (can’t play Tarzan & Jane without a proper vine to swing on), the office, the backseat, the beach, the hobbit bakery…
It’s just vanity and culturally derived sense of status. The bigger the master bedroom, the more successful it makes them feel. I’d rather have a huge kitchen myself.
Perhaps you would if you had a bigger bedroom. If you had a nice table or desk by a window, you might pay bills or write notes and make lists there. If you had a nice chaise or day bed in your bedroom you might do some reading there. If you had a nice romantic fireplace you might have even more sex there.
Bedrooms are cool. In a sense they exist on a plane of their own, private and divorced from the relative formality of the rest of the house. They can be intimate and relaxing and cozy and if you have enough stuff in them you can do lots of enjoyable things while still feeling relaxed and comfortable and cocooned in privacy and luxury.
I need a bigger bedroom to allow me to get around in it in a wheelchair - I can get around using crutches if I am not having a very good body day … unfortunately I am having more and more bad body days as time goes on. I figure I will be totally wheelchair bound in about 2 years if it keeps progressing as it is now.
I know that for insomniacs that ‘bedrooms should exclusively be for sleeping unless you are sick’ but I like being able to lock myself away in the bedroom to surf the internet when mrAru and our roommate are doing something loud, or having friends over and i feel like being alone. I have my desktop set up in here, and I have a hospital table for my laptop when I am stuck in bed =)
Kitchen is good, but I’d rather have a big den/feasting hall. Couple-three big ass TVs, full sized pool table, fire place, gun cabinet, bar, pinball machines, couches, recliners, dinner table/chairs, sound system, small stage.
When you are a family guy with kids of a certain age, you spend a lot more time at your house. When I was a younger guy, my apartment/house was just a stopover point to keep my stuff between activities. Now that spend most of my time here, my wife and I need a little private space!
Our house is kinda divided into public and private places. The entire bottom floor with the exception of the garage is public space. The entire front and back yard are public spaces. Our kids, kid’s friends, kid’s friend’s parents, our friends, neighbors, relatives, and other people go all over these places freely all the freakin’ time.
The only place we got is our bedroom. Other than our kids, no one, and I mean no one, goes in there. When the kids go in there, they know they got to relax. Snuggling, reading, and watching tv quietly are ok. We got it set up like a little apartment, and that takes up some space. It is a “master retreat,” like a little private vacation home within the (noisy) home. Nah, who am I kidding, I really just like a huge master bedroom because I am vain!
The wheelchair reason I can definitely understand.
The rest of the comments so far seem to be a matter of opinion or living circumstances.
There is nothing I do in my living room that I wouldn’t do in my bedroom. Well, I wouldn’t feed my pets in my bedroom but other than that. Likewise, there is nothing that I do in my bedroom that I wouldn’t do in my living room. I do have a romantic fireplace (and yes, we have had sex in front of it). I also have a nice desk in front of a large window with a very nice view. I read wherever I want. I watch TV in my bedroom or my living room. I do homework in every room in the house. I relax in every room of the house. If I ABSOLUTELY have to get away from my boyfriend, I can go in the other bedroom. This hasn’t happened since he got his CPAP.
What I don’t have, is privacy issues. I only live with one other person and the only things I don’t do in front of him don’t happen in the bedroom OR the living room.
So, I can definitely understand needing privacy, even though I don’t need it.
My next question:
Are you single or childless and still have a huge bedroom? Why? If you don’t need it as an escape place, what’s the appeal?
I spent years living in a house where there wasn’t really a master bedroom, and there was barely enough room in my bedroom to make the bed (and there wouldn’t have been enough room to make the bed if it had been a king-size bed).
I need my space. I like to have some room to lie down and do Pilates on the floor, which I couldn’t in my old house but can now. I like having a love seat and a table where I can stack books. I like that I can wander around a bit before getting dressed and going out into the rest of the house. Also, I need the closet space.
Nice to have a bathroom attached to it, too.
It’s just a matter of preference. I, for instance, cannot imagine what anyone does with a huge kitchen. I don’t have a huge kitchen, but it’s adequate for any kind of cooking I might want to do, including big family dinners.
If I were single and childless, I could live in about 200 square feet, and I did.
We have a good-size bedroom, and I like it. It’s big enough that we didn’t have to put our queen-size bed in a corner, which makes it much easier when it’s time to change the sheets! But not, a master bedroom doesn’t have to be enormous. Like Dio, given my choice, I’d rather have a really big kitchen!
However, mho is that people on House Hunters are all self-entitled, demanding, greedy little pricks. I’ve seen so many couples on that show, who were already living in a 3BR house, who were house-hunting because they were ‘expecting their first child, and now need more space!’ Seriously? You can’t have a married couple and one child living adequately in a 3BR house? :rolleyes:
Those times when I’ve had a big bedroom it was a studio, so the “bedroom” was “everything in the house except for the bathroom”.
I do hate cramped rooms, though: those hotel rooms with the huge bed that leaves just enough space on each side to walk like an egyptian, for example. I’ve seen people whose bedroom was the one “private” room they had, the one room where people would not interrupt unless someone was bleeding, and who had there a small reading space, the static bycicle or both. Still, something like the master bedroom that Miguel Boyer and Isabel Preysler have (150m[sup]2[/sup])? Dang, my whole 2B1b is 60m[sup]2[/sup] and a standard government-aided home (VPO) is barely under 90m[sup]2[/sup]: I have no idea why would anybody need a bedroom which can fit both of those in, one beside the other.
Ditto. With one bathroom, two sons and a husband, me the only female.
Yes.
These days we are now empty nesters, with periodic visits from the kids.
I do not need that much volume space to gain privacy, but it’s nice, especially with the attached bathroom.
Also, we share the bedroom (not the bed!) with two mastiffs.
At some point, we probably will again be in a smaller home.
I need space in a bedroom for my gaming systems and hobby desk. If the bedroom is big enough for that without feeling cramped then it’s big enough for me.
My husband and I closed on a house on Tuesday, and I’ve claimed the master bedroom. Partly it’s because of the attached bathroom, but partly it’s because I want the space for a lot of my books, my desktop, and my sewing things. I generally keep the cats out of my bedroom, and sewing things and kitties do NOT mix. Well, the kitties will attempt to eat most of the sharp shiny sewing things, as well as the thread, and even though there’s a convenient 24 hour emergency animal clinic nearby, I prefer not to have to rush my cats to the vet when I can prevent it. I need the closet space, and I need the exercise space (I have a Cardio Cruiser, which is fairly small for home exercise equipment, but it DOES take up space, and I hate to drag it out and put it away every day).
Mostly, though, I like to have my books in my room. And Bill prefers that I keep my books in my room. It’s not a question of status, but rather that Bill gets grouchy when he thinks that my books are taking over the house.
I currently have a huge master bedroom and am shortly to move into a house with a much smaller master bedroom, and I can’t wait!
Our current house is a terraced cottage and the third floor is all open as one big bedroom. It was originally a weaver’s cottage and this third floor was open across several houses to form a large workroom.
At present, we have all our bedroom furtniture plus a couch and five bookcases in that room. I’m looking forward to feeling cosy in my bed, which I don’t at the moment.
To be fair, though, couldn’t that just mean “we’re starting our family and will eventually need more space, and the time to move is NOW before we’re trying to do it with a rampaging toddler”? We lived in our 3br terrace till child number 2, but I’d hate now to have to squeeze back into it.
But I haven’t seen House Hunters so for all I know I could be entirely off base there.
I’m not sure I understand this- have you claimed it to the exclusion of your husband, as in, he gets the other bedroom and you get the master? Or do you mean you claimed it for the two of you, and the cats can have the run of the rest of the place?
To the OP, I don’t really get the appeal of a huge master bedroom either. Ours is a pretty good size- a little bigger than we probably need, but we bought the house in spite of it, not because of it. There are 4 of us who live in the house and we use our bedroom for sleeping, changing clothes, and sex. We *live *in the rest of the house, and we retire to the bedroom at the end of the day. I can’t imagine wanting to spend any more of the day in there- that’s what the rest of the house is for.
