Summary: For most of history, “home” was less a haven than a cramped, communal shelter where privacy, comfort, and furnishings were rare luxuries. In The Making of Home, historian Judith Flanders traces how domestic life evolved over 500 years—from shared straw beds and dirt floors to the advent of hallways, upholstered furniture, and window curtains. The book reveals how the idea of the home as we know it today is a recent invention born of industrialization and rising living standards.
The historian Judith Flanders’s book The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes takes readers on a multi-century journey through the history of housing. Before the industrial era, the majority of humans spent their lives barely surviving in shelters that most people today would not wish upon their worst enemy.
“Five people living in one room, with no sanitation, lit and warmed by firelight, ‘cramped, musty and indescribably filthy’. . . [these were] the ordinary living conditions of [our] own history.”
Privacy was practically nonexistent. “For most, the past was a world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was . . . almost unknown. For most of human history, houses have not been private spaces.” An abundance of rooms with distinct purposes is a recent phenomenon. “For much of human history, cooking [took] place in the main living space” over the central hearth. The first corridor or hallway to appear in a domestic residence debuted in 1597 in London. Most homes had far too few rooms to justify such an extravagance.
Comfort was rare as well. Earth floors were common for centuries. By the 17th and 18th centuries, wooden floors were more common, and “even the rich generally had wooden floors,” with the marble floors seen in many paintings of the period being aspirational rather than realistic depictions of homes. In the 17th century, the Dutch routinely spread sand over their floors, and the British did so into the 18th century. “The sand soaked up grease from open-fire cooking, as well as wax and oil from lighting.”
People had few furnishings or other possessions throughout most of history, so what little they owned often served multiple functions. “Furniture was mobile because there was very little of it, and what there was necessarily moved around to fulfil many and different needs.” It makes sense that in most European languages—from the French and Spanish meubles to the German Möbel, and from the Polish meble to the Swedish möbler—the word for furniture shares an etymological root with the English word mobile: “Furniture for everyone but the very wealthiest, was historically almost perpetually on the move.” At one time, the word moveable could mean furniture in English (it is used in this sense in a line in The Taming of the Shrew, for example).
Even the rich moved their furniture around frequently. In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, the servants of the wealthy Capulet family are ordered to clear a room for dancing by moving the furniture away after a meal: “Away with the join-stools, remove the court-cubbert [a kind of cupboard] . . . turn the tables up.” Turning a table up meant removing its legs and turning it onto its side for space-saving storage. “Until the first third of the nineteenth century, and later in many places, for most people below the rank of French kings, furniture . . . remained pushed back against the walls” when not in use. Heavy furniture with a fixed location in a home, as opposed to light moveable furniture, is relatively recent. “It was only from the end of the seventeenth century, as some of the great houses began to allocate a separate room for eating in, that wavy tables that were not routinely moved came into use” among the rich.
In Europe, “until well into the late seventeenth century the household furnishings of the modestly prosperous were so scanty that it is possible to itemize them almost entirely in a few sentences.” An ordinary home might have a table, benches, a chair (often just one), a cupboard, fireplace tools, cooking implements, and that was about it.
Surviving inventories from Europe reveal that homes there also often remained relatively empty:
The entire household goods and furnishings of one late-seventeenth century labourer consisted of a tabletop without legs (buckets or barrels probably substituted,) a cupboard, two chairs, a bench, a tub, two buckets, four pewter dishes, ‘a flagon and a tankard’, three kettles and a pot; a bed with two blankets and three pairs of sheets; a trunk, two boxes, a barrel and a coffer, a drainer, and assorted ‘lumber and trash and things forgot.’ This man was by no means impoverished. His three sets of sheets marked him as a man of some substance, and, even more, so did the bed, for beds were far from common.
Lacking beds, the majority of people simply slept on straw-stuffed sacks. “Until the fifteenth century, most Europeans slept on sacks stuffed with straw or dried grass, which were nightly placed on boards, benches or chests, or directly on the floor, in the main, or only room.”
Beds were “objects of status and display for those fortunate enough to have them.” When present, beds usually represented a significant fraction of a family’s wealth. “In the seventeenth century, up to a third of a Dutch household’s worth might be tied up in bedding; into the eighteenth it might be up to 40 per cent for a working man’s family.” People worked for years to save enough to buy a bed. “In some regions of Italy as late as the eighteenth century, it might take six years for a labourer to save enough to buy a bed and bedding. Altogether, often more than half of a family’s wealth was invested in its beds, bedding and clothing.” A bed was a status symbol. “For this reason, beds were given pride of place in the main room, where visitors were able to see them,” in homes that had more than one room.
Chairs were also once rare. “In the Middle Ages chairs were found in courts, and in the homes of the very great, but rarely anywhere else.” Perhaps one reason that ceremonial chairs—dubbed thrones—became symbols of authority was that throughout history few people owned even a single chair, let alone a fancy one. Outside of royal or noble residences, even “in the seventeenth century, chairs were found only intermittently in daily life, and were by no means routine items of household furniture.” Even among the elite, pieces of furniture now considered standard were few, while more modest homes possessed hardly anything:
In Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1633, a household valued at £100—very wealthy—possessed two chairs. Half the houses in Connecticut before 1670 had no table, and while 80 per cent had chairs, each household averaged fewer than three, less than half as many as there were residents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, a third of houses in one county in Delaware still had no tables, and the same number had no chairs. Some adult family members sat on benches or chests at meals, their food resting on their laps, while children rarely had chairs, and were usually expected to stand while they ate. In the Netherlands, Jan Steen’s 1665 [painting] A Peasant Family at Meal-time shows only the man of the household with a seat at the trestle table.
The most versatile, and thus most common, piece of furniture was the chest or trunk: It could serve as seating, as a table or desk, and even “as a base for bedding,” in addition to providing storage space. People stored everything in their chests, from clothing to food, despite a lack of dividers to separate the contents. “In Bologna in 1630, a theft of linen and cheese from the same trunk was recorded without surprise.” Around the 16th century, the shelved cupboard appeared, allowing for better separation and organization of stored items.
Like many types of furniture now considered ordinary, cupboards were once an extravagance reserved for high society. “As with beds, tables and chairs, cupboards began as luxury items for the wealthy,” only becoming available to the middle class in the late 17th century in some countries such as the Netherlands. Next, consider drawers. Today, owning a dresser with drawers that open and shut is not seen as particularly remarkable, but the first chest of drawers debuted at Versailles in 1692—a luxury fit for royalty. Upholstery also was once the purview of kings. “Padded furniture had appeared in the seventeenth century [and] by the late seventeenth century Whitehall Palace in London contained at least two upholstered chairs.”
Only during the late 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution began to raise living standards, did more ordinary households come to possess “new luxury commodities,” such as window curtains and a sofa. Sofas were also high society items in the beginning. In 1743, the wealthy British politician and writer Horace Walpole wrote of his love for his sofa in a letter (for owning a sofa was the sort of thing worth bragging about), and “his correspondent was forced to admit that he didn’t know what a sofa looked like.” The sofa was adopted rapidly by the late 18th century, as were other forms of padded furniture. The poet William Cowper even penned a verse paeon to domestic comforts, entitling the first section “The Sofa” (1785).
“The great changes in domestic furnishings that had come with the Industrial Revolution” transformed home interiors.
Many amenities went from rarified luxuries to commonplace home features. Consider clocks. “Pendulum clocks were invented in 1657. Two decades later, no modestly prosperous Dutch farmer owned such a novelty; but twenty years after that, nearly nine in ten did.” Next, consider window curtains. “Between 1645 and 1681, only ten inventories in one county in Massachusetts included any curtains at all.” Curtains, when present, were not divided into convenient window-framing pairs as they are today. In fact, “single curtains were found at the very apex of society, in the Mauritshuis in the Hague, in the 1680s, and the Rijswijk Palace . . . in 1697.”
Glass windows themselves were once rare. “Early glass was the most fragile of materials: a pane might shatter in strong winds or heavy rain. When wealthy owners travelled between their houses, therefore these delicate, and valuable, panes were routinely removed from their frames and carefully wrapped and stored. . . . Because of this, until the early years of the sixteenth century, the glass panes and the windows they were fitted into were considered to be separate items,” with the glass being considered furniture rather than a part of the home and not necessarily conveying upon the sale of a home. “In Oxfordshire in the sixteenth century, less than 4 per cent of the inventories of the poor and the averagely circumstanced mention any glass windows at all; even among the better-off, it was less than one in ten.” In fact, even into the 19th century, half of the houses in the United States had either no glass windows or just one, often consisting of only a single small pane.
Flanders’s book paints a picture of the preindustrial home that was dark, quite literally.