Experiencing American Houses – Elizabeth Collins Cromley

A hall and a parlor constituted a typical two-room house in the Massachusetts Bay era. The hall was an all-purpose room incorporating portable mattresses made of cloth cases and filled with leaves, cornhusks, or feathers, which were laid on the hall floor at night. The parlor was the special room of the hall-parlor pair reserved for higher-ranking people and activities; owners would keep their bedstead in the parlor (see fig.

2, Boardman House hall-parlor plan, in chapter 1). Beside the bed a dining table and chairs enabled the householders to entertain small groups for dinner. The owners’ beautifully furnished bedstead provided a showpiece to impress dinner guests, while storage chests in the parlor held plates, table and bed linens, clothing, eating utensils, and drinking vessels.

Hall-parlor houses often expanded onto a second floor, which provided extra sleeping space for children and servants. A ladder gave simple access to the upper level, but boxed stairs were common in more developed two- room houses. Householders with more resources added a third room, a cooking kitchen. An extra sleeping room could be built adjacent to or above the new kitchen, where it benefited from the cooking fireplace’s heat.

If the main cooking fireplace was removed to the addition, it opened up the possibility for the old hall to become a more informal service and sleeping room that supported light household work and beds instead of cooking. Some people remained in one-room houses through the eighteenth century, and some retained earlier attitudes and slept wherever there was a place to lie down, while the elite began to build separated private chambers for their beds. The elaborate bedsteads and specialized bed textiles called “bed furniture,” previously found in a parlor, would be moved to a separate chamber.

For even more firmly separating a private zone, builders created the chamber floor on a second level.

1 | Spaces for Cooking 2 | Socializing: Parlor, Living Room, Family Room, Living-Kitchen 3 | Spaces for Eating 4 | Sleeping, Health, and Privacy 5 | Circulation, or Getting from Here to There 6 | Storage 7 | Conclusion For Further Reading Notes OceanofPDF.com Illustrations Fig. 1. Freestanding Brick Kitchen, Brush-Everard House, Colonial Williamsburg Fig. 2. Plan of the Boardman House Fig. 3a. Dairy, Winslow House, Marshfield, Massachusetts, and Fig. 3b. Dairy Building, Eyre Hall, Eastern Shore of Maryland, c.

1800 Fig. 4. Three Doors in the Kitchen of the 1786 Burtch-Udall Homestead, Queechee, Vermont Fig. 5. Root Cellar, Butte, Montana Fig. 6. Tripod at the Virginia Mansion, Stratford Fig. 7. Drawing of Progression of Cooking at the Tobias Walker Farm, Kennebunk, Maine Fig. 8. Kitchen and Rear Ell, 1807 Rundlett-May House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire Fig. 9. Plan of the 1860 Gibson House, Boston Fig. 10.

The Magee Grand Range of 1894 Fig. 11. Vaux and Radford’s Tenement Apartment Fig. 12. Plan for Van Dyck House, New Jersey, Including Butler’s Pantries Fig. 13. Plan of Isabel Bevier’s Inexpensive Suburban Home, 1912 Fig. 14. Advertisement for an Ice-Box, c. 1897 Fig. 15. Drawing of the Kohl Sisters’ Homesteading Shack, c. 1908 Fig. 16. A 1927 Electric Refrigerator Fig. 17. Keene’s Design for an Early Twentieth-Century Kitchen Fig.

18. Sears Modern Kitchen, 1951 Fig. 19. Veggli House at Old World Wisconsin, 1840s Fig. 20. Overview of Shirley Plantation in Virginia Fig. 21. Plan of Calvert Vaux Fig. 22. Gleason’s “Parlor View in a New York Dwelling,” 1859 Fig. 23. Plan of the Boyce House, Chicago Fig. 24. Plan of a Cheap Flat for the Working Poor, 1874 Fig. 25. Carved Rosewood Chair and Later Craftsman-Style Unornamented Oak Chair Fig. 26. Plan of the Kentucky Bungalow, by the Aladdin Co., 1919 Fig.

27. Armstrong Tile Advertisement Featuring Midcentury Rec Room Fig. 28. Barry Wills Open Plan, 1955 Fig. 29. Bird’s-Eye View of Almon Fordyce Living Kitchen, 1945 Fig. 30. Spruce Lake Model House from Timberhaven Log and Timber Homes Brochure Fig. 31. Drawing of Expansion of Randolph Family’s Virginia House, Tuckahoe, 1740 Fig. 32. Nature Themes in Dining Room Fig. 33. Plan of the 1883 Central Park Apartments Fig. 34. A Maid Serves Nine, 1888 Fig. 35a. Floor Plan of the Ansonia Apartment-Hotel and Fig.

35b. Detail of its Kitchenless Apartments, New York, 1907 Fig. 36. Drawing of Combination Living Room and Dining Room, 1927 Fig. 37. House Plan Featuring Built-in Nook by Architect Charles E. White, 1923 Fig. 38. Modest Dwelling in Greenbelt, Maryland, 1939 Fig. 39.

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