The altercation over the naming of the bedroom tax – the attempt by the government to style it the "spare-room subsidy" – may not just be about the government's desire to avoid being seen to tax heavily the very poorest people in our country. It may also be that the phrase bedroom tax conjures up something so eye-stingingly awful, so intrusive, so snooperish, such a bullying intervention into – literally – the most private area of life, that decent people instinctively shudder.

There are numberless ironies and small cruelties here. For a government that rails against the nanny state and seeks to roll it back, to find itself in the bedroom, measuring up who needs what in this intimate space, should be a grotesque embarrassment.

The idea of home and sanctuary is so bruised in all this. Opponents of the tax rightly attack the brutishness of the catch-all – hitting foster parents, the disabled, the modern family with all its patchwork ways. One peer, Lord Best, back in the House of Lords debate in 2011, caught the deep importance of how a home should soothe and protect.

"A spare room keeps a family together. It allows teenagers to have their own bedrooms; it allows parents to help older children pick up the pieces if they come home at a time of crisis; it allows the adult child to come home to look after a poorly parent when they come home from hospital; it allows the divorcee to have children to stay; it allows couples to sleep separately if one is ill or recovering from an operation; it allows the younger disabled child to have their own room; and so on."

The problem for the government and Lord Freud, enthusiastic proponent of the bill (and himself not short of bedrooms, having two large houses) is that everyone else in our society recognises that a bedroom is something special. If we had merely to sleep, we could do it as the poor used to, four or five or six to a bed.

The importance of the bedroom as a private space can range from the literary (Virginia Woolf) to the decorative. In Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford places Fanny in her grown-up life by remarking on the changes to her bedroom – a new quilt on the bed and a "close" carpet, but the same Caravaggio and Raphael on the walls.

Down the commercial route, the language of the decoratives – the Ikeas, the interior magazines, the prime minister's own mother-in-law (co-owner of furniture firm Oka) all insist on the spiritual satisfactions of the well-designed bedroom. Here's Oka:

"Decorating a bedroom is an opportunity to indulge and experiment in what is a very private space. Create an oasis of calm in a palette of neutrals using our white painted, Scandinavian inspired bedroom furniture and fabrics, or ramp up the atmosphere with pieces in Oak or black Chinoiserie, opulent velvets and faux fur. We offer a complete range of luxury bedroom furniture and accessories that make it easy for you to create the ideal retreat."

Elle Decoration directs us to the "cocooning and warm-hearted" qualities of Scandi bedroom design. We're urged to remember the needs of teenagers for their own private spaces and we know that for studying and reading young people need quiet and room.

But from 1 April, none of these shared considerations will count for the 660,000 people in social housing who are to be hit by the bedroom tax. Perhaps the Coco Chanel solution might suit them? She had an opulent Paris apartment with no bedrooms, since she slept nightly in her suite at the Ritz. We've always known that the poor are free to dine at the Ritz. Now they may be equally free to sleep there too.