Where the Day Begins and Ends

A room with two jobs, designed for one.

A bedroom is asked to do two things that pull in opposite directions, and most bedrooms are designed for only the first.

The first is sleep. It wants darkness, quiet, cool air and as few reasons to be awake as possible. This is the version everyone designs for, and it produces the calm, dim, softly furnished room that appears in every photograph of a bedroom. There is nothing wrong with it.

The second is waking, and it wants close to the reverse. Light, and specifically early light. Somewhere to sit that is not the bed. A route out of the room that does not disturb the other person in it. Enough space to get dressed without the wardrobe door reaching the bed. These requirements are as real as the first set and occupy a comparable amount of time, and they are routinely designed around rather than designed for.

Orientation is the clearest example. An east-facing bedroom is usually argued against on the grounds that it will wake you, an objection largely solved by a curtain. The stronger point is what that room does on the mornings you are already awake, which for anyone with young children is most of them. Sitting in early light is a different experience from sitting in a room that gets no sun until three in the afternoon, and it sets the tone of a day that has often started earlier than you would have chosen.

Plans are usually resolved the other way round. The best aspects go to the rooms occupied in the evening, on the reasoning that those are the rooms people spend time in. That held better when houses were empty during the day, and it never held very well for the first hour of the morning, which in most family houses is one of the busiest of the day.

Door swing belongs in the same category and is almost comically small as a decision. A door that opens against the wall it is hung in gives a route in and out without exposing the room. A door hung the other way sweeps across it. If one person is up at half past six and the other is not, that detail decides whether both of them are. It takes a few seconds in a drawing and is lived with for decades.