Once lived in a thatched-roof, timbered farmhouse in Denmark, close to the Baltic Sea. Surrounded by a cobbled courtyard, the outside of this house exuded charm. To enter, one
had to push open an enormously heavy, hand-carved Dutch door. This felt like entering a fairy tale, and so upon first visit I stepped across the floor of unmonitored bricks ready for adventure.
I soon found that anything spilled on those bricks would fall right between the cracks and disappear. I also discovered that the primitive, dark kitchen was a playground for an extended family of mice, some quite stout.
As was the architectural norm in homes of that era, one room led directly into another. From the tiny kitchen, one entered the dining area—large enough to seat a good-sized family and quite a few hired farmhands—and this was adjacent to the formal parlor. A steep, iron spiral staircase led upstairs where one bedroom led into another, and you had to go through the first bedroom, then the second, to get to the only bathroom. In other words, there were no ways to avoid personal quarters or render privacy.
The idea of the corridor, a centrally located hallway with bedrooms and bathrooms opening off from it, wasn’t known in Europe until the seventeenth century. Previously families lived with a more generous idea of togetherness. Often more than one family lived beneath one roof and in only one or two rooms. Just a little imagination can conjure a lot of interesting scenarios in homes of two or three hundred years ago. But guessing at how comfortably the families experienced their homes is based on our own culture in which individuality is priority. The invention of the home corridor brought to Europe not just intermediary space but expectations of independence and privacy, part of a raised standard of living.