Accommodation

“ In those ancient days of Western civilization, it was the habit not only to put several beds in one room, but often to devote one bed to the accommodation of two men, but by being content with a very small apartment, I had succeeded in getting a room all to myself. ”

“ Notwithstanding all the elegance of the public portions of the houses, and perhaps even of the private chambers, it seemed as if the actual comfort of the inhabitants could not be great, and especially in the matter of bedroom accommodation, for I imagine the sleeping-rooms were of the smallest dimensions—mere closets, not such as people of the present day in good circumstances would approve. ”

“ The peculiar combination of day and night accommodation is without analogy in any house; whilst the sitting, working, or reading, and, occasionally, the taking of meals, in a corridor, a place used also for exercise, and for the passage of persons from one part of the asylum to another, represent conditions of life without parallel among the domestic arrangements of any classes of the community. ”

“ There is at all times a greater likelihood of finding accommodation, and such accommodation as may be desired, in houses of such formidable dimensions; but the visitor’s importance suffers a shock: he becomes nothing but a number, and as such is termed by the employés of the hotel, and shouted up and down the speaking tubes. ”

“ We must premise to the honorable company that our accommodation is of the simplest; 'roughing' shall be the order of the day. Ladies are not to look for Lyons silk ottomans in their dressing-rooms, nor shall we promise that our conservatory furnish a fresh bouquet for each fair guest at breakfast. ”

“ The rooms of the poorer class have neither wooden walls nor floors, and are just large enough to admit of the inhabitants sleeping, and perhaps turning round in them. The whole interior accommodation is comprised in bedsteads with very little covering, a small table, and a few drawers. Beds and chests of drawers answer the purpose of benches and chairs. ”

“ All over the house, in fact, the accommodation is on a much more limited scale, unless it be with regard to stables, which, owing to the low price of horses, are more numerous, if less luxuriously appointed. ”

“ What a relief it is, when suffering with illness, to be transported from a close, dirty cabin to a large room and tidy accommodations! How soothing to a sick man are those thousand little conveniencies and delicacies which only the hand of woman can supply, and from which the sufferer on shipboard is debarred! The well-aired bed linen; the clean and tidy apartment; the flowers placed on the stand opposite the bed; the green jalousies left half open to admit the cooling breeze ”

“ The accommodation is too limited for the population of 2000, [1] which is masculine mainly, and is liable to frequent temporary additions, and beds are occupied continuously, though by different occupants, throughout the greater part of the twenty-four hours. ”

“ Sleeping accommodation—that is to say, shed accommodation—is provided for about one-quarter of the number confined there. During fine weather it is no hardship upon the natives to sleep in the open yard provided that they have some covering. ”

“ Then, after more eating and drinking, the guests dance until the small hours. Sleeping accommodation is found for all—bedrooms for the older and 140 more respected persons, the barns for younger ones—and often a near neighbour's house shelters many. ”

“ Things are improved, too, in the way of light and air; both the public and private rooms of our hotels are far more cheerful and better appointed than they used to be, and instead of the four-posters there are French beds. The one great advantage that our new system possesses over the old is, indeed, the sleeping accommodation. ”

“ A house should be planned and constructed for the use of the household, with incidental accommodation for our immediate friends or guests—which can always be done without sacrifice to the comfort or convenience of the regular inmates. In this remark, a stinted and parsimonious spirit is not suggested. A liberal appropriation of rooms in every department; a spare chamber or two, or an additional room on the ground floor, 26 looking to a possible increase of family, and the indulgence of an easy hospitality, should always govern the resident of the country in erecting his dwelling. ”

“ This includes a great deal of eating, a great deal of attendance, the use of reading-rooms and smoking-rooms—which, however, always seem to be open to the public as well as to the guests,—and a bedroom with accommodation which is at any rate as good as the average accommodation of hotels in Europe. In the large Eastern towns baths are attached to many of the rooms. I always carry my own, and have never failed in getting water. ”

“ The Common Lodging House, as the reader no doubt understands, is a house of accommodation for all classes—no matter what may be their appearance or character—only provided that they can procure, when required, the necessary quantity of coins. In every considerable village in the kingdom there is a lodging-place called the “Beggars’ House;” ”

“ Surely in a handsome house of twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be light and space enough for the average family, however fastidious or exacting. In the country, where one needs many spare rooms for the accommodation of guests, there are some advantages in the possession of an abnormally large house. ”

“ Every family in the ward has a room set apart in this great building for its permanent and exclusive use for a small annual rental. For transient guests and individuals there is accommodation on another floor. ”

“ House accommodation became wholly inadequate to meet the requirements of the great multitude, and holders of tenements made enormous profits by letting portions of their mean dwellings at extraordinary high rents. ”

“ Beds are scarcely known: for most the bare floor or the mountain side is sufficient sleeping accommodation. The better class of houses, however—the residences of those whom wealth and luxury have enervated—often have benches or shelves on which are placed mattresses and blankets. ”

“ The smallness of the apartment, and the general desire amongst the peeresses and the various members of the nobility and rank of the land to be present upon so important and interesting an occasion, rendered it necessary that very extensive alterations should be made to secure sufficient accommodation, and considerable ingenuity had been exercised in order to accomplish that object, every corner and nook from which a glimpse of the court can be snatched being provided with sittings. ”

“ This rent is quite as much as the majority of old existing cottages are worth, for most of them have but one bedroom, and are wanting in those accommodations which are essential to decency and comfort. ”

“ The halls and apartments are large, lofty, and very finely furnished with all domestic conveniences except sleeping accommodations. Here dramatic entertainments are frequently given, mostly by amateurs, and generally for charitable purposes. ”

“ Its accommodations for ladies are also very good, their rooms opening into ventilated piazzas, or galleries, as they are termed here, which are as necessary to every house in this country as fire-places to a northern dwelling. ”

“ Admitting, then, without further argument, that well conditioned household accommodations are as important to the farmer, even to the indulgence of luxury itself, when it can be afforded, as for those who occupy other and more active pursuits, it is quite important that he be equally well instructed in the art of planning and arranging these accommodations, and in designing, also, the various other structures which are necessary to his wants in their fullest extent. ”

“ The living accommodations provided for employees seemed to me everywhere distinctly inferior to those provided in America. In London, “as far as possible the men are lodged in the basement, while the women have their rooms at the top of the house. This arrangement, though always desirable, often necessitates two or even three men using the servants’ hall as their bedroom, while another sleeps in the pantry, and another beneath the stairs. ”

“ The facility with which I slid into their peculiar views of comfortable sleeping accommodations seemed to have a very salutary effect upon the tempers of our hosts; for the half-clad man turned out to be the husband of the sewing woman, as well as a person of considerable importance in his own neighbourhood. ”

“ Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally consist of the apartments on one floor. The house, we will suppose, consists of three stories above the basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom, and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger family occupies two floors.) These three suites of apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table-linen, and plate, if required, are found by the proprietor, and in the basement story usually lives a man and his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers ”

“ They have no place for the beds to stand, no room for the doors to swing, no room for a piano, no room for a generous sofa, no room for the book-cases, no room for easy stairs, no room for fireplaces, no room for convenient attendance at the dining-table, no room for wholesome cooking, no room for sick people, no room for fresh air, no room for sunlight, no room for an unexpected guest. They have plenty of rooms, apartments, cells—but no real, generous, comfortable house room. ”

“ Not so easy a task as one might imagine either, in an apartment which combined kitchen, laundry, bedroom, dining-room and the other conveniences common to housekeeping in a 12 × 15 space, as evidenced by the presence of a stove, a table with a tub concealed beneath, a machine, a bed, a washstand, two chairs, and a gayly decorated bureau, Norma's especial property, set forth with bottles of perfumery, a satin pin-cushion and a bunch of artificial flowers in a vase. ”

“ My house as I have already mentioned, was one room in a tenement. It opened directly upon the street. In one corner was a bed. Opposite the door was a stove for cooking and warming the house. A table and two chairs besides my little sewing-chair completed the furnishing of the apartment. The floor was bare, except where I had put down an old coverlet for a rug before the bed. Here in this crowded place I cooked, ate, slept, worked, and received company and offers!
"Just as an example of the way in which some of my suitors broached the subject I will describe a scene. ”

“ This house was under the management of respectable people—a man and his wife, with a fixed salary—who had one hundred boarders, all men. Five or six beds stood in each room. Fresh air, cleanliness, and good order prevailed every where. I saw also a lodging-house somewhat of this kind, but for decayed gentlemen. Each of these had—besides a small sum weekly—a bedroom, together with fuel and the privilege of reading in a common room. Each cooked his own food by his own fire. ”

“ The family apartments are in a very antiquated taste, somewhat heavy and often inconvenient, but full of the solemn magnificence of former times, fitted up with rich though faded tapestry, unwieldy furniture, and loads of massy, gorgeous old plate. The vast fireplaces, ample kitchens, extensive cellars, and sumptuous banqueting-halls all speak of the roaring hospitality of days of yore, of which the modern festivity at the manor-house is but a shadow. ”

“ An apartment of different appearance is necessary in smaller middle-class households, where the maids have to spend their leisure time in the kitchen, and also in the homes of the working-classes, where the kitchen is the living-room of the family. ”

“ In the large room—the living room—there were two beds, a hammock, some chairs, two tables, and—a "New Home" sewing-machine! Off one end of this there was a small apartment also containing two beds, and separated from the larger one by a board partition perhaps six or seven feet high.
In my inmost heart I longed for the privacy of this narrow space, but such was not in accordance with our hostess' idea of hospitality. I was assigned to a bed covered by a crucifix-surmounted canopy, in the main room, and Vincent was invited to take the other. ”

“ I had now time for a survey of the apartment; and, generally speaking, a drawing-room is no bad indication of the tastes and temperament of the owners of the establishment.
The practised eye speedily detects in the character and arrangement of a chamber something of its occupant. In some houses, the absence of all decoration, the simple puritanism of the furniture, bespeaks the life of quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings. You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. ”

“ No herding in one common community of forlornness; each small apartment or establishment is perfect in its way, with its own entrance, and its own little kitchen and sleeping room. There are people appointed to look after the comfort of those who are finishing their days there, but nobody to interfere with it. ”

“ All the visitors were to be "put up" of course; and from the exhaustless [24] piles of material stowed away in the ample store-rooms, bed-rooms were improvised in every hole and corner, and beds made up wherever beds could decently go—in the store-rooms themselves, in the school-room, in the laundry, in the gardener's cottage, as well as in the numerous guest-chambers with which this, in common with other Australian "country seats," was regularly supplied. ”

“ The front apartment is used as a bed-sittingroom, the back one as a store; and in some cases a lean-to outhouse has been built of blocks of the same material, in which cooking is done and the goats kept. ”

“ The other apartments—the Breakfast-room, Billiard-room, Smoking-rooms, Ante-rooms, and what not—as well as the bed-room suites, are mostly elegant in their fittings, convenient in their appointments, and replete with choice works of Art. ”