Why These Rooms Disappeared From Our Homes

Source: Why These Rooms Disappeared From Our Homes, Stewart Hicks, 12:41, uploaded 2025-10-02, playlist index 182.

Stewart Hicks starts with an old house plan and a room labelled “parlor”. The room has disappeared from most homes, yet its descendants remain in the living room, the dining room, and the open-plan space that joins kitchen and sitting area. Hicks uses that sequence to read floor plans as records of daily routines, domestic work, leisure, family structure, class, and taste.

The parlor as waiting room and display

In the early nineteenth century, people spent a great deal of time waiting. Magazines had not yet become the standard way to fill the time, and many people could not read. Guests waited in the parlor, a word that comes from the French parler, “to speak”. Hicks first connects the name to the room’s arrangement, which made conversation easy. The room then acquired another way of speaking. Its drapes, wallpaper, paintings, vases, and furniture told visitors who lived there and what sort of life they could afford.

The parlor therefore worked as an advertisement. It offered an image of a lifestyle for sale, even to people who did not yet own the objects on display. Hicks shows Victorian girls and women practising these arrangements in collages that layered objects and people into a carefully composed room. A real parlor performed the same work at the front of the house, where it faced the street and presented the household before visitors reached the dining table. Guests could wait there while food was prepared at the back of the house.

The arrangement helped build the American middle class through manufacturing and conspicuous consumption. Parlor objects were bought for display rather than use. Owning more than a household needed became part of taking part in a new social class. That display depended on people the room kept out of view, including servants and women who worked in kitchens and other parts of the house. Children also entered only at certain times. The room’s refinement required labour, and the plan made that labour easy to overlook.

Parlors remained common until the 1920s. The Great Depression weakened the economic conditions that sustained them, although Hicks adds another history to the room. Families displayed recently deceased relatives there before burial, so visitors could pay their respects. Funeral parlours retain the name, and their house-like appearance sometimes comes from converted homes or mansions.

The living room as a change in expectation

The domestic parlor eventually became the living room. Hicks describes this as a campaign led by Ladies’ Home Journal, which wanted to replace the term “death room” with a name for a room used for ordinary social life. The argument was practical. A household could use its main room every day instead of dedicating it to a rare event. The same journal also helped popularise the American bungalow, whose living room occupied the position that the parlor had held.

The change in name carried a change in expectation. A living room can look like the old parlor, and the dining room can remain beside it, whilst the household treats the rooms differently. Hicks resists translating the parlor into a simple earlier name for the living room. The two rooms share a location and a lineage, yet the parlor belonged to a system of display, waiting, controlled access, and formal visiting.

Dining rooms and the open plan

Dining rooms developed alongside parlors as their food-based counterpart. Earlier households ate in kitchens, sitting rooms, or rooms simply called eating rooms. Once the dining room became established, it also inherited the parlor’s display function. A cabinet of family china could hold plates that nobody used. The collection showed family history, disposable income, and aesthetic taste.

That arrangement is declining. Hicks cites a figure of 50 per cent of US homes having dining rooms in 1990, then reports that fewer than 25 per cent of realtor.com listings now report one. The second figure describes listings rather than a census of homes, and the video gives no method or date beyond its own publication. Its direction is clear within the source’s account. People continue to eat, yet they increasingly use eat-in kitchens, island counters, or sofas.

Hicks compares the old parlor plan with a new Chicago home whose front and back doors open onto one large room. Eating still has a place, although furniture and rugs mark the zones in place of permanent walls. The video reports that almost 86 per cent of Americans prefer this kind of arrangement. It gives no survey details, so the figure remains a claim made in the video.

The open plan gathers several pressures into one layout. Cooking has become more social and domestic labour has shifted across class and gender lines. A table between kitchen and living room can support eating and paid work. A separate room with decorative plates becomes harder to justify when a household needs flexibility, has less money for specialised space, or expects resale buyers to recognise current conventions. Visual contact between rooms also suits people who want to remain connected while they cook, eat, watch something, or answer work.

Hicks treats these pressures as forces acting on the floor plan. Behaviour changes the activities that rooms need to support. Technology changes what a room can do, as a computer turns a dining table into a possible office. Building codes and construction methods affect the available arrangements. Family structures and dual-career households alter the occasions on which people eat together. The dining room recedes through their combination, rather than through one isolated decision.

The family room as a new room

The living room began as a rebranded parlor. In a 1920s house, toys were still kept out of sight and children were expected to remain invisible during formal social life. The baby boom of the 1940s made that arrangement difficult to maintain. Television created another problem. Early televisions were wooden, furniture-like objects that stood on legs in the middle of a room. Their position and the furniture arrangement required for watching them did not fit a room organised around visiting.

Several architects responded by adding an extra room. The house still had a living room, yet the new space held children’s toys and the television. The architects faced the same storage problem and hired George Nelson, then the lead designer at Herman Miller. Nelson invented the storage wall for this purpose and developed the idea in Tomorrow’s House, a 1945 book written with Henry Wright.

Nelson gave the new room a name: the family room. This was a new domestic category rather than a renamed living room. He recommended materials that could withstand dirt and play, then designed furniture and modular storage that suited informal leisure. The room gave children and television a place inside the house without asking the living room to carry every activity.

Nelson described design as a response to social change. Hicks uses the family room to show what that means in practice. The room appeared because household life had changed, and its furniture made that change easier to live with. The design expressed a move away from performing a household for visitors and towards rooms that could accommodate the people who used them.

Floor plans as social documents

Hicks qualifies the history. The parlor-to-living-room-to-family-room sequence mainly describes white middle-class American families with enough money to worry about impressing guests and enough space to give rooms single purposes. The claim about floor plans reaches further. The way a home divides space shows who has power, who does the work, and what the occupants value.

He gives an ondol-heated floor in a traditional Korean home as an example of an arrangement that brings a family together through shared warmth. Courtyards in many warm-climate cultures extend domestic life into a communal space that can include people beyond a household’s blood relatives. These brief examples do not supply a comparative history. They show how the same question can be asked of any plan: which room receives the most space, which room must stay orderly, where guests wait, and where ordinary life is allowed to spread.

The rooms in a house are therefore choices about social life. Their names can change when their expected use changes, and an entirely new room can appear when a new activity becomes ordinary. The floor plan records those changes in walls, furniture, storage, and the paths people take through the home.

Limits and references

The video builds its history from floor plans, technical drawings, magazines, architectural examples, and the books listed in its description. Its figures about dining rooms and open-plan preferences lack full citations and methods in the video. The account also stays focused on a particular American middle-class history. It offers the Korean ondol and warm-climate courtyards as prompts for comparison, rather than establishing how domestic space works across those cultures.

The references named by the source are:

• Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003).
• Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (1988).
• Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (1981).
• Ladies’ Home Journal, various issues from 1900–1930.
• George Nelson and Henry Wright, Tomorrow’s House: How to Plan Your Post-War Home Now (1945).
• Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986).
• Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992).
• Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981).