How many bedrooms is my fictional homeowner renovating?

April 23, 2022 6:30 AM

I'm working on a story (well, not a story-story, but nevertheless a fictional thingamajig) in which my person is renovating (not restoring) a fairly grand Victorian mansion built in the U.S. at an undetermined point in the 1800s. I'd like it to be earlyish 19th century, but I can make it later if it makes more sense. I'm having trouble conceptualizing the space, though, particularly in terms of bedrooms.

I (think I) know that Victorians didn't really value individual personal spaces very much, so bedrooms generally would have been pretty small. So my person is probably putting some bedrooms together for larger rooms, and, say, a nursery that might be larger because it's for several kids plus nanny or governess becomes a regular bedroom, and maybe something like a billiards room, if it's in the right location, could become a bedroom.

So how many relatively spacious bedrooms can I stuff into my pretty big, fancy Victorian house without it looking like a weird Frankenmansion? The original house would have been the largest and grandest of this small town of mostly fairly wealthy people, built and inhabited by the biggest bigwig. (The small town is basically a beauty spot enclave for people retiring from surrounding larger cities, or they have always lived there, but they don't depend on The City to maintain their wealth). So it's an impressive, large place, but it's not Biltmore House. It has always been a single family dwelling-type, most lately belonging to someone rich (not local) who used it as a vacation home ... or intended to, but didn't really use it that much, or invest much attention in it. Now it has been bought by an ancestor of the original owner, and will be a family home again. It is an important building to the town, and will host some smallish civic events after the reno. (small concerts on the grounds or in the ballroom, art shows, flower shows, occasional teas for the ladies who lunch, that kind of thing.)

The home has passed through different hands and undergone various changes and renovations over the years, for better or worse, so it's not in its original condition. My person is restoring some sections (formal dining room, for example), while updating others (kitchen, baths, bedrooms) for more modern comfort and appeal. It is not being made into a bed and breakfast, but a few time a year needs to accommodate around 15 visitors, sometimes more like 10. I'm not trying to make it have exactly 15+ bedrooms, because there's some play in the outbuildings, but I can't quite grasp how many are going to be able to fit in there. Money is not an issue for my lucky fictional renovating person. My lucky fictional renovating person also wants it to be aesthetically pleasing, with a graceful flow, so not "how many bunkbeds can I fit into this butler's pantry" kind of thing.

Help me help my lucky fictional renovating person!

posted by taz to Home & Garden (17 answers total)

This Victorian on Zillow has 8 bedrooms: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/375-Nanny-Hagen-Rd-Thornwood-NY-10594/33058547_zpid/

And this has 6: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/309-N-Broadway-Nyack-NY-10960/2083636776_zpid/

8 bedrooms: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/9-Convent-Ln-Center-Moriches-NY-11934/111552878_zpid/
posted by xo at 7:17 AM on April 23, 2022

If you're seriously thinking of a Victorian structure, you'll want it to be from the late 1800s - Victorian architecture wasn't a thing generally until after 1850, and in the US, what we typically think of as Victorian (stick-style, gingerbread, Queen Anne type stuff) is more from 1880 to 1910. Early 1800s would be more Georgian/Federal style, which would be more brick with white trim, Neoclassical, symmetrical stuff.
posted by LionIndex at 7:32 AM on April 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

I have lived in two very old houses and have two things to think about.

The first house I don't actually remember because I was so young, but OMG I heard the stories about the aunt who was utterly horrified that we only had one bathroom and that we had to CLIMB STAIRS to get to it (my father told her that he remembered when she only had an outhouse and was happy to have it). What may be pertinent to you is that the one bathroom was a converted bedroom. Really old houses weren't built with bathrooms. (I knew someone from rural Iowa who asked a relative why the shanty room wasn't converted to a bathroom in order to have a single bathroom in the house, and this relative said that people would have thought it was too disgusting to have a bathroom in the house at all - relative was probably born in the 1920s.) I have not seen a very old house with a downstairs bathroom, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

The second thing is that is that really old houses weren't built with bedroom closets. People used wardrobes instead. So, depending on the age of the house, bedroom closets would probably have been added in a renovation. The house I lived in (this one as an adult) had one extremely tiny closet in one of three bedrooms. Zillow says it was built in the 1920s.
posted by FencingGal at 7:52 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I do not have broad experience with Victorian mansions as a category but I did live in one from c. late 1890's for a couple of years. It had been renovated twice, in the late 20th century to produce 7 bedrooms with 8 baths in a configuration you might be able to assume from those numbers, and then again in the early 21st century to update it. Five of said bedrooms were on the upper story, none on the lower story, and two in the beautifully converted below-grade kitchen and servant quarters space where we lived. The lower floor retained a fair amount of the presumed original layout, with modifications to include a modern-sized kitchen and pantry space. The foyer, entrance parlor, formal dining room and family parlor were retained.

The carriage house had been partitioned into a rec room space and an extensive wine cellar. In the garden, a structure that had not yet been re-renovated or restored was said to have housed Jim Morrison the second time he lived in Alameda. It was stuffed with storage.

Next door was a somewhat larger mansion structure, totally dilapidated, that I believe had undergone conversion to 10 or 12 apartments at some time in dacades past. Only the basement apartment was habitable (for a certain definition of habitable) and had a tenant. Nice guy!

Anyway, while I can't speak to the broader trends around mansion renovation, the landlord/owner was very chatty, loved the house, and shared a lot about his journey with it. Happy to answer questions or provide partially-informed spitballing.
posted by majick at 8:26 AM on April 23, 2022

The top floor would have small bedrooms with no fancy details, for servants who lived in the house. Prosperous people would have a cook and a maid, and maybe a nanny, who lived with them. If there was a garage or coach house, the chauffeur might have lived in a loft over it.
posted by zadcat at 8:33 AM on April 23, 2022

There would probably be a hidden tiny servants staircase somewhere.
posted by yyz at 8:50 AM on April 23, 2022

At first I thought you were asking about Victorian style houses (gingerbread, Queen Anne, etc), and I've been in many of those. For Victorian mansions, though, the ones that remain are often open to the public. For example, Cedamere was originally constructed in the 1700s but heavily renovated and added to during the 1800s. I think this may be more what you are thinking than, say, Gilded Age Mansions that would technically be in the Victorian era.

Teddy Roosevelt's house,
Sagamore Hill, is a Victorian mansion from the late 1800s that is also Queen Anne style.
posted by miscbuff at 8:56 AM on April 23, 2022

Our Restoration Nation on YouTube buy, restore, and tour for-sale old houses, specifically Victorians.
Watch some of their tours and you’ll get an idea of the spaces, and what the spaces are for, and the architectural history of them.
posted by Crystalinne at 9:11 AM on April 23, 2022

The Maupin Mansion in Lawrence, Kansas, is another one that may interest you (it goes by a bunch of names, but that's the one I knew it by). That was almost certainly the grandest house in Lawrence (though most of Lawrence was burnt to the ground during the Civil War, so that would reduce the competition). It looks like construction began in 1870. I found a paper about it with a floor plan.

Lincoln's Home in Springfield, Illinois, may not be grand enough for what you're looking for, but I it had just one one servant's bedroom. It was built in 1839 as a one story cottage. The Lincolns enlarged it to twelve rooms and two stories between 1846 and 1855. A floor plan I found shows five bedrooms, including the servant's.
posted by FencingGal at 9:13 AM on April 23, 2022

If it’s not going to be a bed and breakfast then they might not be converting any public spaces into bedrooms. I lived in an old Victorian in college and it handily slept 20 with several singles. It was immense.

The ground floor had a two-car garage with storage space and a large walk-in pantry, a large kitchen, a small servants bedroom adjacent to the kitchen, a large double bedroom next to that, and then three large connected open front rooms, one which we used as a tv room and two as connected dining rooms/living rooms. There was a basement large enough for significant storage space AND and a laundry room AND a sleeping couch area.

One central staircase went up to the second and third floors which had 6 single bedrooms and 5 doubles between them. Those rooms were all large enough for at least a twin bed and a large wooden desk, or 2 for doubles. I’d say the bedrooms were in general larger than bedrooms in midcentury houses I’ve lived in. Top floor rooms were smaller and had sloped ceilings and dormer windows.

Hope that description is helpful!
posted by bq at 9:41 AM on April 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Victorians didn't really value individual personal spaces very much

That seems completely backwards to me ! more a description of the great-hall era (and only the first half of that). Victorians valued private space a lot, but it all went to people at the top of the hierarchy. Dressing rooms for master and mistress (separate from bedrooms and from each other), study or sewing room ditto, parlor for the adult children, and ideally a series of reception rooms for increasing intimacy with the family.

My parents were at the edge of the 1970s re-evaluation of Victorian houses*, and One Good Trick was to repurpose a dressing room or upstairs closet to get an upstairs bath. The main closets had windows so they could air out all those Victorian clothes. I think we don’t even recognize them as closets any more.

Servant’s quarters, if any, terrible. One of the early womens rights arguments was to value homemaking skills enough to expect that every servant had a room with a door, not just a place to put a pallet in the kitchen.


* parental summary: the only kind they could afford in stagflation, as the houses had been loathed and neglected for decades
posted by clew at 10:20 AM on April 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

American Vernacular Interior Architecture, 1870-1940; Jan Jennings, Herbert Gottfried; Iowa State University Press, 1993 might be a useful book to request from your library.

The architecture of country houses : including designs for cottages, farm houses, and villas, with remarks on interiors, furniture, and the best modes of warming and ventilating (Archive.org; 1851)
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:48 AM on April 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Years ago, my sister and her husband bought a largely unrestored Queen Anne/Italianate built in the 1870s-1880s that had been in one family all that time. The kitchen had a porcelain sink hanging on one wall. That was it. No counters, no cupboards, no appliances. Linoleum on the floor. There was a foyer, a beautiful front staircase and an enclosed back staircase. A tiny powder room had been tucked under the front stairs.

The family bathroom was on the 2nd floor under the eaves. To get to it, you had to walk through a large anteroom that ended up as a catch-all. The main bedroom was very large and a handyman built a wall of closets and a window seat. The two other bedrooms were good-sized, no closet in one (used as an office). The other adjoined the square Italianate tower which was converted to a closet.

Back on the ground floor, there was a large formal front room (not used) and the parlor and dining room (non-working foot buzzer under the table to summon the maid) next to the kitchen. Pocket doors separated the two rooms. Wooden floors throughout but the dining room only had the “finished” floor around the edges. What would be covered by a rug was wood planks. The coolest thing was the unfinished attic. The house had a slate roof and you could actually see cracks of daylight around the edges of the massive slabs but somehow rain never got in.

It looked like a large house from the outside but between the hallways, the awkwardly placed anteroom, the unused front room, there was a lot of wasted space. I forgot, another project was replacing all the windows, there were 37.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:57 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I grew up in a neighborhood of big old Victorian (1880s-90s) houses, though none of them were quite as huge as you're imagining. I think your house is more likely to be mid to late Victorian (1850s and on) than early Victorian, just because that was the era that wealthy industrialists and merchants started building big houses in small towns. Before that, the pattern was more to have one house in your place of business (either a big city, a port, or a mill town) and then flaunt your wealth on a huge country estate that would be at least partly a working farm. For example, Newport, RI didn't have its first mansions built until the early 1850s, and lots of the really huge ones that are modern tourist attractions weren't built until the 1890s or the early 20th century.

As others have pointed out, these houses had a relatively set layout (though it could vary dramatically in scale). The front entrance was to an entry hall with a grand staircase up to the second floor. Most of the rest of the first floor would be public rooms for entertaining: dining room, various parlors, if you want a billiards room that was original, it would be here. At the back of the first floor would be the kitchen, often connected to the front hall by a long, thin corridor, and to the second floor by a small back staircase. (This was an era when servants were getting more expensive, and all but the wealthiest of families would have to make do with only a couple live-in servants, so setting the house up so that, e.g., your maid could be back in the kitchen helping the cook, but still make it to the front door to greet your guests in a timely manner was an important economizing measure.) There would also be a powder room (i.e. half-bath) somewhere for guests to use, possibly tucked in the back by the kitchen or under a staircase.

The second floor was where the bedrooms were. In our house, there had been three main bedrooms, plus an odd long room above the kitchen that was either a nursery or a servant's room. By the time we lived there, two of the main bedrooms had been combined into a master suite. You say you want your house to sleep 10-15, but a lot depends on how much comfort and privacy you want those guests to have (and how many of them will be sharing rooms/beds). At the holidays when we were kids, we sometimes had 12 family members staying in our 5 bedroom house, but that involved people sleeping on fold-out couches in various rooms on the first and third floors, or occasionally us kids sacking out on sleeping bags in the master suite.

The third floor was generally a ramshackle collection of odd-shaped rooms and storage spaces under the eaves. Historically, this is where the servants quarters would be. In our case we had a bathroom that had been put in some point in the first half of the 20th century, a guest room and the room my Dad claimed as his office. I also saw neighbors (larger) houses where they had knocked down all the interior walls to create a big open space. This could conceivably be where your ballroom is, if it was the result of a 20th century renovation.

The basement would have originally been unfinished, but they tended to get finished into living spaces that reflected the idiosyncrasies of whoever did the renovations some time in the 20th century. Maybe some 1950s Dad put in a bowling alley or a tiki bar, or a 1990s man-cave. Maybe this is where your billiards room is. One neighbor of ours put in an elaborate facsimile of an old movie theatre that seated 6, complete with a projector, a 12 foot wide screen and a popcorn machine.

The other thing I haven't seen anyone else mention is that these houses, especially the ones that were in small towns where the owners would be spending the summer away from the big city, would have all sorts of features to beat the heat in a pre-air conditioning world. In the case of our house, that meant a long, covered veranda on one side of the house (great for cold drinks on a hot afternoon), and a semi-enclosed porch on the other (great for dinners on long, sunny summer evenings). The original master bedroom had an attached sleeping porch, which had been enclosed and attached to one of the other bedrooms by the time we lived in the house. We also had a terrifyingly massive house fan that my Dad lifted into place in the third floor bathroom every spring, that was designed to exhaust the hot air under the eaves and pull cooler ground-level air into the house. It made a heck of a racket and seemed practically designed to eat the fingers of the unwary, but it made a huge difference on hot summer days in the years before my parents paid to have central AC put in.
posted by firechicago at 2:36 PM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

My mom lives in a 6 bedroom Victorian and I want to +1 clew's point. You don't need to string bedrooms together because the bedrooms are already plenty big and typically had little rooms to the side of them as dressing rooms or studies or whatever. A lot of the bedrooms in the house feel more like "suites" than like bedrooms. For the bedrooms in mom's house that are weird sizes, there are generally reasons for that -- being under the eaves or whatever -- that are hard to cure.

I think you could *easily* have *at least* 10-11 bedrooms without making it look too weird. My hometown has a lot of houses like that but the really big ones (more than 8 bedrooms) have mostly been converted into something else -- typically condos, but sometimes offices, and even a halfway house in one case -- because nowadays there just is no market demand for a 10,000+ square foot single family home with 9+ bedrooms.
posted by phoenixy at 2:40 PM on April 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you so much everyone; all great info, and I have a much better spatial (and temporal) grasp on this now!
posted by taz at 7:52 AM on April 24, 2022

Here are the complete floorplans and other details from a mid 1800s Victorian mansion in Independence, Missouri.

Here are complete architectural drawings and a conditions assessment along with maintenance priories for the 1880 Vaile Mansion in Independence. It might be useful just because it lists a bunch of specific maintenance and upkeep tasks for various parts of the house. It is more Second Empire than Victorian per se, but I imagine you can sort out details like that without too much trouble.
posted by flug at 10:09 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]