The Drawing Room – what’s yours called?

The Drawing Room – what’s yours called?

But is it a ‘drawing room’, ‘living room’, ‘sitting room’, ‘front room’ ‘reception room’ ‘family room’ or ‘lounge’? These days it is sometimes also called the ‘television room’ – which tells you a lot about the principal function of that room in some households – and in the not so distant past it might also have been the ‘parlour’, which until the emergence of the ‘funeral parlour’, was where you laid out your dead – in addition to where you received and entertained.

There really isn’t much of a working consensus on the use of these terms in the English speaking world and the semantic difficulties are not just a product of national culture, but also class. Even a cursory trawl through estate agent internet listings up and down the country reveal striking variations in the naming of this room in different regions and price brackets. As if these difficulties on what that one room is called are not enough, there are then all sorts of quandaries on what the contents of that room are called: Is it a sofa, settee or couch, looking glass or mirror, chimneypiece or mantelpiece, wireless or radio? In Britain these issues have always been a dangerous social minefield, and marked you out as either ‘U’ (upper class) or ‘non-U’ (invariably the aspiring middle class). Although the upper and working classes shared a similar disdain for the poncey genteelisms of the middle class, preferring to call a spade a spade, the working classes have however never called a drawing room a drawing room.

To add to the confusion there has been a proliferation of other rooms – all with a similar purpose – that in estate-agent-speak all fall under the umbrella of ‘reception rooms’. In fact the desirability of a house today is greatly enhanced not just by the number of bedrooms, but also the profusion of ‘reception rooms’ like ‘studies’, ‘morning rooms, ‘sun lounges’ ‘garden rooms’ or ‘conservatories’. Luxury today is increasingly defined by the higher incidence of superfluous spaces of questionable functionality.

As most of these rooms are clearly in imitation of country house norms, they are largely a product of social awareness and taste. Long before the advent of interiors magazines and property porn on TV, the aspiring middle classes were able to mimic aristocratic tastemakers, from the 18th century onwards, with the help of the lavish catalogues and pattern books put out by designers and architects like Robert Adam. Meanwhile aristocrats proudly opened up their houses to enthusiastic hordes of middle class tourists. There were even guides on hand to explain how all their rooms were used and how they were decorated.

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