VII. The Children’s Rooms

The full complement of children’s rooms required for the family will, besides the sleeping apartments, consist of three—the day-nuirsery for the younger children, the schoolroom and playroonn for their elders. It is unfortunate that incomes do; not vary directly with the size of families, and so the streets of a town often present the anomalous condition of large houses occupied by small families and small houses overcrowded with large ones. On a winter“s night in London, for instance, one may observe the tenements of the poor crowded to overflowing with their occupants, while the streets., too, are occupied by those who have not even these apologies for homes; a.nd yet there are thousands of empty rooms in the larger houses untenanted.

Restricted means make it necessary to substitute a single apartment for the night and day nurseriess, in which case, if possible, the beds should be placed in a recess. Or, agiaijn, a single room may fulfil the functions of playroom and schoolroom. More rigorous conditions will demand that the elder children prepare their lessoins in the hall, and will deprive the children of their private apartment, as it hasi already deprived the parents of theirs. It is still maintained, however, that these successive deprivations should be faced in the reduction of the plan, rather than the household be cramped by making the house consist of a number of small boxes, and in these cases its members should fall back on the bedroom for occasional use as a sitting-room. In many cases a portion of the roof-space affords a place for the children’s playroom, and the form and position of the attic is very well adapted for this use. The children can make as much noise as they like without disturbing the other members of the family, and it is easy to adapt the structural timbers of the roof to support a swing and other furnishings of the gymnasium. A children’s room on the ground floor may have its separate entrance to the garden through a sunny verandah, which will enable them to keep as much as possible in the open air.

It may be well to reconstruct our conception of the home and to consider it not so much a place for the reception of visitors as for the rearing of children; and in its planning the inclusion of at least one large room will be of the greatest benefit to the health of their bodies and minds. In houses where circumstances do not allow of ample accommodation for special children’s rooms, it is urged that the central apartment should become to a great extent a place for their work and play.

It is no part of the scheme of this book to discuss the planning of schools, but it is so intimately connected with my present subject that I hope to be excused a brief digression. The private school is too often a building planned, and not well planned, for a house, and rooms intended for occupation by members of an average family are overcrowded with children. In Board schools special rules govern the planning and limit the occupants of its rooms, but in the average school no such rules are enforced or observed.

But even in the Board school an excessive zeal for light and air has led to an unnecessary expanse of windows, so that its rooms are subjected to every variation of the external atmosphere, and can neither be readily warmed in winter or cooled in summer. In warm fine weather children should be taught in the open air in sunny verandahs or garden-rooms. In winter they should be able to feel really indoors in the school, and not confronted with the glare of large walls of glass. Light and air they should have in plenty from windows of reasonable size placed in right positions; but an excessive expanse of window area, while it does not materially increase the light, destroys the whole function of a room as a shelter from external conditions.