Onion Theory Home: a Short History of an Idea

By Otto Friedrich

It is strange to realize how many things that are taken for granted as natural and eternal were invented at a specific time and place. Not just objects like electrical appliances but attitudes and perceptions. Like privacy, for example. Or the need for physical comfort. What is comfort, anyway, and where did the idea come from?

Witold Rybczynski, an engaging professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, got immersed in such questions because he found that when he designed homes in the approved modern style, they often made his , clients feel uncomfortable. When he designed his own house in the same way, he felt like one of his clients: "I found myself turning again and again to memories of older houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable."

The word comfortable did not acquire its modern meaning until the 18th century; its original Latin root, confortare, means to console, as in Jesus comforting the afflicted. The medieval citizen who used the word in that sense could scarcely use it about his house, which generally consisted of one large room, little heat or light, a minimum of furniture and no running water. "In the Middle Ages," observes Rybczynski, "people didn't so much live in their houses as camp in them."

It was in the 17th century Netherlands that work space first began to be completely separated from living space. This naturally led to a growing sense of privacy and domesticity, still nearly unknown in the swarming feudal manors of France or England. Since land was scarce, the prosperous Dutch burghers built small and narrow brick row houses, with separate rooms and considerable decoration. Since space was limited, they invented the double-hung window to replace what are now called French windows. The Dutch also believed strongly in schooling and kept their older children at home, whereas French and English children were ordinarily sent out as apprentices at age seven. With more light, more privacy and more children came a stronger sense of family life -- comfort is what we see in the interiors of De Hooch and Vermeer.

British and other merchants visited the Netherlands, admired what they saw and took home not only a taste for brick row houses with double-hung windows but such Dutch discoveries as Chinese tea and Oriental carpets. In Georgian England of the following century, the practical was combined with the beautiful. Lo, the great furniture makers: Sheraton, Chippendale, Hepplewhite. "Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort," says a character in Jane Austen's Emma.

Life in Emma's England may have been pleasant, but no modern intruder would feel at home there. Houses with handsome fireplaces remained pretty cold, reading by candlelight was difficult, and there was still no running water. It was only the industrial era that brought such improvements as household gas lamps in the 1840s, electricity in the 1880s and then the great heap of laborsaving appliances at the turn of the century. In 1870 fully 60% of employed American women worked as household servants; 50 years later most of the servants had vanished, to be replaced by electric vacuums and washing machines. "The feminine idea of the home . . . shifted the focus from the drawing room to the kitchen," Rybczynski writes, "which was why, when electricity entered the home, it was by the kitchen door."

Rybczynski keeps differentiating between what a house looks like and how it functions, and charges that architects all too often concentrate on the former. A case in point was Le Corbusier's celebrated "New Spirit" pavilion at the Paris exposition of 1925: bare white walls, stairs made out of steel pipes, only a few restaurant-style chairs. "The house is a machine for living in," said Le Corbusier. This concept became very fashionable, but Rybczynski finds it hopelessly contradictory: "Marble kitchen counters and bamboo window shades . . . a Matisse on the wall and a sleeping mat on the floor."

He is quite specific in his views of how to make houses more pleasant. "Reexamining bourgeois traditions means returning to house layouts that offer more privacy and intimacy than the so-called open plan, in which space is allowed to 'flow' from one room to another," he writes. "A reexamination of the bourgeois tradition of comfort is an implicit criticism of modernity, but it is not a rejection of change."

Only after writing a whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly transparent so that all can be partly seen at once. And then, "common sense will do the rest."