How the Family Room Went Public

In 1945, while conceiving his first collection for Herman Miller, George Nelson and Henry Wright published the seminal book Tomorrow’s House. “As soon as wartime restrictions end, the demand for housing will burst into a great building boom,” wrote the editors of LIFE, which printed a preview of the book. “This happened after the last war. But people did not know what they needed in a house. As a result they got homes which were outmoded before they were built.”

Nelson and Wright wrote with urgency: The window between the end of the war and the production of what would eventually balloon into 13 million new houses was short, and it was up to them to save America from its traditional self. Despite the title, their book was not a catalog of technological advancement—when they write of climate control and solar heating, their suggestions include attic fans and concrete floors to store daytime warmth.

Tomorrow, to them, was social. Tomorrow, we would acknowledge that modern women work. Tomorrow, we would grant that kids need somewhere to play. Tomorrow, we would think about storage. Tomorrow, we would embrace how we use our homes today, rather than buying the clapboard cottage with shutters mentally filed under, “Dream House.”

The centerpiece of the home of tomorrow was neither the formal dining room nor the fussy parlor, but a room that served multiple purposes, allowed for messy hobbies and easy-to-clean surfaces, a wall of cupboards for hi-fis and board games, sofas for sprawling, and a fireplace for fondue. “It marks the first time a room for the whole family has appeared in the home since the days of the farmhouse kitchen,” they wrote. Uncharacteristically at a loss for a catchy label, Nelson and Wright called it, “the Room without a Name.”

Visiting Tomorrow’s House in 2018, this room is entirely recognizable: It’s been called the great room, the family room, the open kitchen, the hub. It is the ground floor of many a modern brownstone with kitchen and dining table and TV area and toy storage and built-in sofa. It is Reese Witherspoon’s enorm-o kitchen island on HBO’s “Big Little Lies.” It is the one room in a McMansion where people actually hang out. It’s great—and it’s easy to see why, as our design forefathers did, that the nameless room has effortlessly replaced the more formal living and dining rooms.

Nelson and Wright’s “Room without a Name” was—in a truly humanistic touch—organized around behaviors, not functions: built-ins would hold stereos, radios, games, art supplies, bar supplies. Furniture was movable. Floors were wipe-able. Nothing was too precious and everything was provisional. Everything a family needed for the pleasures of family life was right there, emphasizing the home as the center and, after the work day came to a close, the priority.

Though Nelson and Wright were prescient about the increasing casualness of American life—in a 1952 Herman Miller catalog, Nelson describes the “contemporary executive office” as “a daytime living room where work can be done under less tension and with fewer distractions”—they couldn’t quite foresee the expansion of “the Room without a Name” from the suburbs into the city, from the home into the bulk of the office floorplate, the café, even the park. And how could they? In the 1940s and 1950s the line between home and work, public and private, seemed ironclad. The family-centered home was intended to promote togetherness of family and friends, not throw the doors open to the wider world.

But in the 21^st century, the work day never comes to a crisp close, and the space of home and the space of work are not so easily distinguished. As after-hours work has bled onto the sofa, so too has the sofa crept into the office. The daytime living room Nelson proposed over 60 years ago still had a hardy desk and handsome work chair, the physical stuff of work, not exactly the shoes-optional rec rooms that typify Silicon Valley offices. Nelson envisioned a kind of professional informality, not an endless kombucha run.

Today, the interconnected rooms and low-slung furniture of “the Room without a Name” have colonized other once-formal spaces. The breakfast bar, adjacent to a flexible arrangement of chairs and ottomans, facing a big screen, is a staple of open plan, innovation-hungry offices. New-look schools have abandoned traditional desks for chairs on wheels, tables that can be pushed together, and soft seating for lounging and collaboration. Kid and teen spaces in libraries avoid all furniture that says, “Sit up straight.” A Brooklyn edition of women’s co-working space The Wing includes a conversation pit, as well as much more 1970s-silhouette furniture upholstered in blush, lemon, and emerald.