In the plans for the large Swedish houses of the 17th and early 18th centuries, rooms were often classified according to size, and not always according to function (Gejvall 1988: 171; cf. Rybczynski 1986: 42). Houses included kammare (small chambers) and kabinett (cabinets), and salar (larger rooms) and salonger (salons), and the interior arrangement of these rooms was often important. Larger bedrooms could, for example, have both antechambers and smaller back rooms to which inhabitants could withdraw (Figure 1). The sequence of movement and the notion of hosting guests was thus an important matter in these plans (cf. Baeckström, 1917: 46).

The chambers and cabinets, however, soon grew more specific — porcelain chambers, milk chambers, writing chambers, guest chambers, etc. — while the more general types of chambers and cabinets gradually disappeared. The early Swedish texts on architecture, such as those by Johan Eberhard Carlberg (1740), Carl Wijnblad (1755–56) and Carl Stål (1834), were all greatly influenced by French architecture, and Swedish residential plans often followed the French style of organizing prominent houses, with an enfilade of predominantly large rooms towards the front of the building, combined with two sets of rooms (antechamber, bedroom, cabinet and wardrobe), one for the husband and one for the wife (Figure 2). These were principles that French architects such as Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Charles-Étienne Briseux and Jacques-François Blondel introduced during the 17th and 18th centuries. An interesting Swedish example can, for example, be found in Baron F. Löwen’s house in Stockholm, from the 1740s (Gejvall 1988: 105f).

The earlier Swedish houses and apartments, influenced by French architecture, could thus be seen as divided into two parts (Gejvall 1988: 255). One part contained social rooms and living quarters, with a large room — the sal — in the middle, and with one series of rooms on the husband’s side and one on the wife’s side. These two different suites of living quarters often included a förmak (antechamber), a bedroom and a cabinet. The other part of the house contained the kitchen area with servants’ rooms and possibly children’s chambers.

The great room, or sal (quite similar in use and style to the French salle; Rybczynski 1986: 38) was an important Swedish room type that acted as a living room, a dining room, and a room for work as well as for parties and for hosting guests. It was also an important room for movement, as many apartments actually required all visitors and family members to pass through the sal to reach the other rooms of the apartment (Gejvall 1988: 188–200). The room type tambur, a kind of lobby or antechamber, was introduced in Stockholm apartments at the end of the 18th century, and came to act as a kind of small entrance room to the sal. It was often used to hang clothes and store wood for the fireplaces. Later it became an important connector to other rooms as well, and as such was well integrated in the spaces of the home. The idea of an antechamber to main rooms was a French idea, but the role that the tambur soon took on was probably more influenced by the way that the Vorzimmer was used in German apartments during the 19th century (see Gejvall 1988: 175–86 for a more thorough discussion on the tambur).

The importance of the tambur increased, and it become larger and lighter, growing into a kind of lobby during the second half of the 19th century (Figure 3). The tambur also came to be physically connected to such increasingly popular types as serving rooms and linen rooms, as well as to corridors and passages, and as such it became key to enabling movement through the dwelling without passage through the more presentable, formal rooms (Gejvall 1988: 107f). The role of the tambur thus changed. It, together with the sal, takes on a less presentable and more functional role, becoming a passage, while the sal often is reduced to the function of dining room (mat-sal).

Instead of the sal, which became less central over time, the main formal rooms now became the salong and the förmak. The spatial organization of the late 19th-century Swedish apartment, inspired by the continental apartment in countries such as France, and interestingly also Germany, can, according to Gejvall (1988: 255), be described as divided into four areas (Figure 3):

From the 1890s onwards, the English influence grew stronger, and the hall started to become a more important and more dominant room (Lundberg 1942: 257; Gejvall 1988: 168ff; Paulsson 1950: 120). The hall plan became popular in the new middle and upper-class villas of the late 19th century, where rooms were arranged around the hall, rather than in line. Soon, the tambur was exchanged for a hall and a cloakroom. The cloakroom allowed the hall to be free from clothes and other paraphernalia that often had cluttered the tambur (Figure 4). The hall, which was more of a room to dwell in than the tambur, also opened up for the spatial connection to even more rooms (of different types), such as the vardagsrum (approximately equivalent to living room, but literally meaning ‘every-day room’).5

At this time, there was also a critique of the salong/förmak (Gejvall 1988: 224) and the idea that hosting visitors seemed to be more important than the living conditions and comforts of the inhabitants. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the centrally integrated hall, the cloakroom and the vardagsrum became popular, whereas the salong and the förmak slowly disappeared (Figure 5). In Sweden, the number of residential room types also seems to peak around 1910 with Isak Gustaf Clason’s houses. Clason designed a series of large houses during the decades around the year 1900 (the last of the large Swedish estates of the 19th-century tradition), still following the Victorian tradition and its plenitude of room types (Edestrand and Lundberg 1968: 48–62). After the 1920s, the number of room types seems to decrease, and during the 1950s several of the former important types were gone altogether (Figure 6). In non-residential building types, the proliferation of more and more specific room types went on longer, until the 1950s. One example is the hospital Sahlgrenska, in Gothenburg, which had about 170 different room types. Perhaps it was only with structuralism, and the call for flexibility during the 1960s (Forty 2000), that the decrease in room types became a general trend.

As the functional differentiation of the home increased during the 19th century, so did different kinds of power asymmetries. Moving the living quarters of servants, as well as kitchens, bathrooms, etc., into the home also played a part in the co-production of distances and asymmetries within the home itself. Social distinctions were important and thus came to take an architectural form (Rybczynski 1986: 49), where servants’ rooms were named according to the title or category of the servant. The built-in asymmetries at the room type level seem to decrease as servants moved out and as the number of room types declined in the mid-20th century.

In summary, residential room types proliferated, first through the French idea of different suites of rooms, then on through the continental apartment plan and the English hall model; all three different models made it possible for the number of room types to increase. The first wave of extinction started slowly during the 1910s and ’20s, with the fall of the representative room types. A second wave of extinction was around the Second World War. The linen rooms, brushing room, maid’s chambers, and gentleman’s rooms6 all disappeared during the 1940s; the tambur and the serving room declined quickly at the same time but endured for a few more decades before disappearing altogether. The tambur, which perhaps was the first catalyst for this rich tradition of different room types, was thus the last to go. Following this history, we can observe that spatial species do not always come and go one at a time. Instead, it seems that there are quite often thresholds where series of new spaces evolve or die. This has been made clear in studies of building types that show, for example, that industrial society came with a series of new building types concerned with production (Markus 1993), but these thresholds seem less studied when it comes to room types. This change of the mid-20th-century residential spaces was perhaps most of all about fewer people and more things (Westerberg and Eriksson 1998: 268); as a welfare society developed and the home became a place for the family to host things rather than people, room types connected to an older kind of society started to decline.

Not all room types come and go in groups. Indeed, a type might also arise from a sudden, abrupt or disruptive invention, a ‘chronic’ moment (Brighenti and Kärrholm 2019) of upheaval and change. Here, I will just briefly mention two examples of room types where this more subversive aspect (breaking with former tradition), is stronger: namely the divan room and the allrum (family room, or literally, ‘everything room’).

The divan as a piece of Ottoman furniture was popular in Europe from the last decades of the 18th century and into the first half of the 19th century. Sweden had good diplomatic connections with Turkey during the 18th century (Avcioglu 2011: 255ff), and King Gustav III made several divan rooms in his palace at Haga (for example, in the pavilion drawn by Olof Tempelman in 1787). The divan thus migrated into Swedish architectural culture and got its very own room. In fact, in Swedish, divan did not refer to the furniture at that time; in a Swedish dictionary from 1853, a divan is defined as a room with low sofas along the wall (Gejvall 1988: 241f). Most often the divan room was a bit smaller than the salon and could be found in large private apartments or houses, like at Stora Bjurum, where a divan room was introduced in 1869 (Figure 7). In at least one case, however, the divan room was also used in a public building. In Helgo Zettervall’s first plans for Sweden’s Parliament House and Central Bank building in 1884, he placed a large divan room very centrally and in direct relation to the foyer (Bodin 2017: 815). This room disappeared in later plans for the building, and to my knowledge it has not appeared on any Swedish plans since then. As a room type, the divan room has no clear (Swedish) predecessor, and it disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.

The second example of abrupt inventions is the allrum. Although the vardagsrum had replaced the salon during the early part of the 20th century, it appears as if this room also became used for more formal events and the reception of guests, and thus the struggle of architects and politicians to establish a room for everyday use continued. The importance of a space used for display and hosting guests, for example, often meant that sleeping facilities were less prioritized, and this was perceived as a societal problem (cf. Paulsson 1950: 120; Perers et al. 2013). One important attempt to change this was the allrum (literally, ‘everything room’), a new room type that was introduced in the housing competition of Baronbackarna in Örebro 1950 (built 1953–57). The housing competition was not aimed at inventing a new room type, but the winning proposal, announced in 1951 (and designed by P.A. Ekholm and S. White), suggested that the traditional living room could act as a kind of study room or studio (arbetsrum). On later drawings this room was referred to as an allrum. An experimental apartment with the very first allrum was built during the summer of 1952, and furnished with a kitchen sofa, a dinner table, a bookshelf and a desk with a sewing machine (Krantz 1987: 96ff; see also Mack 2017: 228ff). The new room type received a lot of attention among architects (Figure 8), but studies in 1956 showed that the introduction of the allrum initially failed. Rather than being used as the family room, as intended, it was used as a kind of salon or finrum (literally, ‘nice room’), and it was only with the introduction of TV sets during the early 1960s that the allrum became a more everyday kind of space (Krantz 1987: 103). Its popularity increased from the 1970s onwards, finally making the idea of a salon or a finrum (even if enacted within spaces tagged as living rooms) obsolete.

In his book Objects of Desire (1986), Adrian Forty has argued that the modern Western home is generally a product of the Industrial Revolution. Through the development of specific work places, coupled with the regulation of work and work hours, the home soon became an important haven of privacy, comfort and leisure: an antipode to work (Forty 1986: 99). During the 19th and 20th centuries, the boundaries of the home were also changing. Rooms and functions that formerly were located outside the dwelling itself, like places for food, bathing, laundry, latrines, etc., now moved inside the dwelling (Gejvall 1988: 101). From a situation where rooms could be rented out even without kitchen facilities (so-called bachelor flats), the standard and comfort of living thus slowly began to increase. New technical infrastructures, such as water pipes, were also introduced in several Swedish cities during the 1860s (Paulsson 1950: 185), and the elevator, which afforded an easier movement of goods and people in and out of the home, was introduced during the 1880s.

New technology developed between around 1880 and 1920 made it possible to achieve a degree of domestic comfort without servants and the accompanying spatial separation between room types. Some room types were no longer needed, or their functions could be integrated into other rooms. As we have seen, the number of ‘indoor’ room types seems to decline from about the 1920s and onwards, and the decrease in secondary spaces outside the home proper actually also continues slowly throughout the 20th century. During the 1930s and ’40s, storage spaces in cellars decreased (Gejvall 1998: 212), as refrigerators and freezers became more common and fresh food could be bought all year round. Another function that moved out of the home was child care. The building of Swedish day-care centres in the 1940s and ’50s meant that child care in the home or in other people’s homes decreased. Bringing laundry facilities closer to the home was another important issue during this century. Collective laundry rooms with washing machines were introduced from the mid-1920s by HSB (a Swedish cooperative association for housing); a national suggestion for municipal regulation requiring laundry rooms was made in 1948 (Figure 9), and in 1965, 90% of the Swedish population had access to a laundry room (Björkman 1985: 88; Lund 2009). However, in the 1990s a series of neighbourhood disputes centred around these places, and as technical developments were made, washing machines moved into apartments (into kitchens and bathrooms).

Parallel to the privatization and movement of activities and goods into the home, the possibility to actually harbour all of these objects and functions had grown increasingly problematic. Although the rising problem of storage space was noted already in an investigation in 1980 (Konsumentverket 1980), the decline of community spaces in the large residential housing areas continued during the 1980s and 1990s, and storage spaces today have to an extent been commercialized and outsourced, as new companies specializing in storage facilities have developed, often in former industrial areas (Brembeck 2019).

Dwellings changed as new room types moved in and others moved out. This can partly be explained by new technology (like water toilets, freezers, etc.), as well as an ongoing urbanization in combination with higher living standards and increasing consumption, which meant that storage spaces were externalised. Activities that were once performed in the home are now executed in other neighbourhoods, cities, regions or even countries (sites of production that were formerly in the home might, for example, have moved to the other side of the world). The home and its room types thus co-evolve with the environment in which they are located. The absence or presence of the different activities of the home seems, for example, to be related to longer trends such as technological development, transformations from a rural to an urban society and globalization.

Related to yet different from the notion of absence or presence is the exchange of room types between different building types. Until the 1960s, it was not uncommon for the homes of rectors, cleaners, teachers, drivers or janitors to be integrated into public buildings such as schools, museums, public baths, etc. (Figure 10). Residential functions do, however, disappear from public buildings with the growing tendency to see the home as a protected and individualized unit separate from work, a place exclusively reserved for leisure and a nuclear family life. The sharing and exchange of room types between residential and non-residential building types nevertheless continued. For example, the vilrum (resting room), which was established as a Swedish room type at workplaces during 1940s, appeared in residential buildings during the 1970s. Similarly, as larger structures and building complexes became more common in the modernistic large-scale plans of the 1960s and ’70s, more traditionally urban categories such as ‘square’, ‘area’ and ‘street’ began appearing indoors. This is connected to the state-subsidised large-scale housing projects in Sweden that began in the mid-1960s, when housing blocks and houses took on a whole new scale (Andersson 1976; Hall & Vidén 2005). Influenced by Team X, large corridors were for example called ‘interior streets’ in Bengt Edman’s Sparta student housing in Lund in 1971. The suffix -yta (area) also became more common, such as arbetsyta (work area) or lekyta (play area) (Figure 11). Indoor squares may not be found in residential buildings, but they began appearing quite often in schools, churches, commercial buildings and offices. There are also examples of how residential room types move into non-residential building types; for example, the allrum soon become popular in schools, and the hobbyrum appeared in churches and parish halls from the 1960s and up until at least the 1980s.

The evolution of room types proceeds at no predictable pace; some develop slowly and over a long time, whereas others might bloom during a short period of time and then fade away. Old and new room types can thus always be found side by side. One example of a short-lived trend was to refer to room types in a diminutive form, by exchanging the suffix -rum for -vrå (nook). Due to the density of the population and a housing shortage, there was in interest in the concept of small dwellings during the late 1920s and ’30s (Björkman 1985: 97), when small room types also developed, also with the suffix -vrå. The kokvrå (cooking nook, or kitchenette) makes its first appearance in 1927 as the most long-lived and important of these types. Other examples include the frukostvrå (breakfast nook), introduced in 1920, sittvrå (sitting nook) 1925, bokvrå (book nook) 1927 and arbetsvrå (study nook) in the 1940s (Figure 12). The suffix did not take off to the extent first suggested, but it was not a total failure either. Some of the nook types still exist, and new versions were also tried later (like the short-lived tonårsvrå (teenager nook) in public libraries during the 1960s).

Another trend that peaked between the 1950s and the 1980s was room types related to leisure, consumption and free time. For example, although it already existed as a room type, the sauna suddenly became more popular during the ’50s (Figure 6). Rooms for hobbies, ping-pong and weaving also appeared during these post-war decades, as well as storage spaces specifically for sports equipment like skis and sleighs. Some rooms might thus only live or thrive for a couple of decades, but there are also room types that disappear even quicker. The ‘battery room for the door bell’ (on a plan from 1870) is one such very short-lived room; another one is the bodega (Figure 13). These short-lived rooms are quite often (but not always, as the case of the bodega shows) related to new technology, and stabilized through what can be called network stabilization (Law 2002); they depend on a series of obligatory actors, such as laws, certain technical infrastructures, etc. One example of this is the telephone room.

The long-lived room type, on the other hand, evolves slowly and mutates, like the garderob (wardrobe), which over time changed almost beyond recognition (Figure 14). In the plans of Jean Eric Rehn’s Lambohov of 1762–66, the garderob is a quite spacious through-way room with a window and a tiled stove. Throughout the 19th century, however, the Swedish garderob was a small, often dark, walk-in closet. It was quite popular, and there were often more wardrobes in Swedish flats than in corresponding flats on the continent (Gejvall 1986: 240). Today, walk-in closets are more often referred to as klädkammare (clothes chamber), whereas garderob more often refers to a standardized, built-in piece of furniture for clothes (cf. Rybczynski 1986).7

Other very long-lived room types manage to resist evolution and to some extent remain the same over centuries. A case in point is the kitchen. Kitchens may have changed from closed to integrated, small to large, but they are still recognizable as kitchens. The kitchen relies on a more fluid stabilization (Law and Mol 1994); i.e., actors may come and go, new ones may be added, others may disappear. Fluid stabilization does not rely on a specific set of actors, but more on a family resemblance between actors. The associations between actors might change — as long as changes are not too abrupt, new actors might be welcomed or released from ‘the family’. One way of illustrating the fluidity and versatility of the kitchen as a category is through its many variants. In the plans studied, from 1750 to 2010, at least 35 different kinds of kitchen types appear, including the quite common grovkök (literally, ‘rough kitchen’, which is the Swedish term for a scullery), sandwich kitchens, milk kitchens, children’s play kitchens (Figure 15), training kitchens, tea kitchens, paint kitchens (färgkök, found in theatres), and barium kitchens (found in children’s hospitals).8

During the period 1750 to 2010, Sweden developed from a rural to an urban society less focused on production and more on leisure and comfort. In cities, residential room types such as the dining room, salon and gentleman’s room, thrived and evolved during the 19th century. However, many rural room types disappeared during the same time (cf. Erixon 1947). The first Swedish norms and recommendations around housing, and its minimal requirements, were published in 1921, and a more proper Swedish science around housing started with the foundation of the research institute on housing (Hemmets forskningsinstitut) in 1944. These efforts eventually led to better living conditions, but also to standardization, and to fewer and more uniform room types. In fact, the number of residential room types appears to have decreased over the centuries, reaching its minimum with a small set of general (and on plans often nameless), standardized room types in the 1960s and 70s.

The stabilization of a series of aligned room types (first by research and then by state recommendations and legislation), is related to the home as a stabilized type. The home grows more and more stabilized as a place of comfort and retreat, but also of functional efficiency. The increasing research on residential room types during the 20th century — how to design kitchens that were easy to work in (Thiberg 1968) or bathrooms that were easy to clean (Linn 1985), etc. — together with the decrease in the number of room types, also paved the way for the standardization of a set of obligatory room types (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living room). The home became a type produced ‘from a standard “kit of parts”’ (Steadman 2014: 358).

The general decline in the number of room types also means that some rooms had to take in activities which had previously been performed in a set of other rooms; the bathroom, for example, now includes activities which formerly might have been done in boudoirs, laundry rooms, nurseries and dressing rooms (Rybczynski 1986: 223). The bedchamber, the children’s chamber and the guest room were all transformed into the more standardized ‘bedroom’. From the 1960s and 1970s, the names of residential room types also began to disappear from plans in the journal Arkitektur. Since these room types were now rather few and tended to be the same from house to house, year after year, there was no need to mark them out. In the early 1990s, however, this changed. The Swedish building standard for room sizes was abandoned, and the building code no longer dictated a detailed prescription for the layout of housing plans, which in turn opened the way for new room types, as well as a new fluidity when it came to the existing ones. The names of room types on residential plans become somewhat more common again, and new types, such as the relaxation room and the spa, have appeared, a trend that seems to continue during the 2000s.