Living Rooms explores the past, present and future of domestic life.

What exactly is a living room? Is it a formal room for special occasions, or a casual space for everyday life? The meaning has been unclear ever since the late 17th century, when architects first considered what “living” in the home meant.

In 1691, in the first edition of what was to become a hugely influential architectural manual, “Lessons of Architecture,” Charles Augustin d’Aviler drew a distinction between formal display spaces and a new kind of room, spaces that were “less grand.” D’Aviler used an unusual phrase to describe these new rooms: “le plus habité” — literally the most lived in. This marked the first time that an architect discussed the notion of living rooms, rooms intended for everyday life.

Before this, anyone who could afford an architect-designed residence wanted it to serve as proof of status and wealth; almost all rooms were display spaces. But once d’Aviler opened the door, French architects began making rooms for specific activities of daily life integral to the design of the home: initially the bedroom, then dressing rooms and bathrooms. These “less grand” rooms were the original living rooms.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania

The focus on daily life within the home quickly revolutionized floor plans. New residences still had grand reception rooms, but these were now confined to one part of the home, a sort of display zone. In Jacques François Blondel’s 1761 plan for a model home, for example, you can see the formal, status-symbol rooms all in a row across the top of the ground floor. The many other rooms in this immense residence were all designed with living in mind.

The home’s left wing was to be the private domain of the mistress of the house and was composed solely of space for daily, practical use: it contained a bedroom and an entire suite of rooms devoted to bathing. On the left side near that wing, Blondel included a dining room. The residence’s right wing was a matching master suite with similarly useful rooms. Many of these had almost never appeared in homes before d’Aviler invented the notion of living space. Thus, a mere half-century after d’Aviler’s pronouncement, the ideal home was made up largely of space reserved for living, and living was understood to mean everyday activities like sleeping and bathing.

Eighteenth-century architects did not, however, use d’Aviler’s vocabulary to describe any of the new rooms. It was only in the early 19th century that the term “living room” was invented. And the only room ever to be described as space reserved for living is the only space in today’s homes where the struggle between grand space and lived-in space continues.

Pierre Frey

During the decades when the home was being redefined to allow for living space, architects included multiple spaces, each designed with a different type of entertainment in mind. In Blondel’s plan, dead center in that top row of rooms is a “grand salon,” an enormous, imposing space for the most formal receptions. Elsewhere in the home were smaller, more casual reception spaces — a “small salon,” for instance, and an “assembly room.”

The desire for overwhelmingly grand reception space gradually disappeared. A 1775 room in the château de Montgeoffroy was still referred to as a grand salon, but it was neither an oversized room nor intended to impress. Instead, it was furnished with casual conversation and board games in mind — the 18th century’s version of family entertainment. By the decade before the French Revolution, the grand salon, too, had become living space. The victory of living rooms over display spaces must have seemed complete.

Matthew Pagett

But the architectural slate is not easily wiped clean. Even today in some homes the living room does not live up to its name. Many living rooms are still display spaces — designed to showcase, for example, a collection of architect-designed furniture that is hardly intended for casual use. Some homes have a grand living room that gets only occasional use, while ordinary social activities take place in a smaller room with another name like family room or rec room. And in many homes, people socialize in the kitchen, while the living room, even if it’s not intended to make a design statement, gets almost no regular use.

Why is it that the one room whose name honors everyday life is so often a place where we do as little living as possible?

Joan DeJean is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual — and the Modern Home Began.”