Winter bedrooms in which, as soon as you are in bed, you bury your head in a nest that you weave of the most disparate things: a corner of the pillow, the top of the covers, a bit of shawl, the side of the bed and an issue of the Debats roses, that you end by cementing together using the bird’s technique of pressing down on it indefinitely; where in icy weather the pleasure you enjoy is the feeling that you are separated from the outdoors (like the sea swallow which makes its nest deep in an underground passage in the warmth of the earth) and where, since the fire is kept burning all night in the fireplace, you sleep in a great cloak of warm smoky air, pierced by the glimmers from the logs breaking into flame again, a sort of immaterial alcove, a warm cave hollowed in the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat with moving thermal contours, aerated by draughty that cool your face and come from the corners, from the parts close to the window or far from the hearth, and that have grown cold again.
In The Way by Swann’s the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time the narrator begins by trying to fall asleep, as he does so his mind wanders through the bedrooms where he has tried to go to sleep before. The book is well known for madeleines and tea, the flavours which conjure for Proust a memory of his childhood. But it is the rooms, and the way that he recalls the atmosphere of the places which he inhabited that captures my imagination.
In this quotation, one of his many incredibly long sentences, he thinks about climbing into his winter bed and making a birds nest of bits and pieces in order to keep warm in his icy room. The priority for the narrator is to separate himself from the cruel chill of the outside. The fire burns all night and the room is filled with “a great cloak of warm smoky air” what he calls an “immaterial alcove, a warm cave hollowed in the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat with moving thermal contours”. This is an account of a world before central heating, a kind of interior atmosphere which leaves you walking from warm patch to cold patch.
Later in the book he recalls the room he would wait in before being taken in to see his aunt to say good morning. Here he describes a room as it is being warmed up, a fire newly lit where:
the fire baked like a dough the appetising smells with which the air of the room was all curdled and which had been kneaded and made to ‘rise’ by the damp and sunny coolness of the morning, it flaked them, gilded them, puckered them, puffed them, making them into an invisible, palpable country pastry, an immense ‘turnover’
Like the great cloak we have another account of heat as a form of enclosure with the room, a pocket created by warmth and the odour of soot and flame. The walls all marked and stained by constant fire, the home before central heating was an architecture made by heat as much as it was by walls.
As new technologies of domestic heating have emerged and been introduced to successive generations the transformation has not just been to do with cost and efficiency. Each new technology has introduced a wholesale transformation of the atmosphere of the home. The enveloping cloak of warmth, the feeling of comfort that comes from adequate heating, these things are, as Proust says, the “immaterial alcoves” which shape our experience of home. In one rather elegant book published in 1929 Sir Lawrence Weaver details the array of Gas Fires And Their Settings which were available to the architect of the time. In his preface he emphasises that heating and ventilation should be seen as a single problem, he describes “effective radiation of heat as the mainspring of hygiene and comfort alike”.
In an acknowledgement of what houses must have been like still at this time he emphasises the need for flues in every room, he says that gas fires are “the most important element in home labour-saving and the best solution of smoke abatement”. Gas fires, and in particular the most sophisticated applications of this technology, represented a new kind of interior where soot and smoke were reduced and a new modern kind of comfort could be created. Some cursory research reveals that Weaver’s wife died of pneumonia in 1927, I wonder if he had his attention drawn to the question of domestic atmosphere and hygiene by her ill health.
One particularly beautiful example of domestic heating systems which he provides is a design for a music room in St. John’s Wood, the grand interior is heated by a concealed fire and radiators. This is presented at the end of the book as a promise of what might come in the future. The walls are painted with murals of modernist cityscapes in Venice, London, Stockholm and New York painted by Clive Gardiner. In contrast to the enclosures of sooty warmth described by Proust this new heating technology was designed to warm the entire room not just a hollowed out cave in the centre of it. The murals give a sense that this is not only a modern interior, but an interior which is expansive, it is connected up with these cultural centres. When the inhabitants practiced their musical instruments they could imagine their participation in an international and open world where they were not held in place by the necessity of remaining close to their hearth. This room, with its modern heating system, appears to promise a new relationship with the world at large.
I remember the first time I read a news report pointing out the levels of indoor pollution caused by open fires and wood burning stoves, more recently boilers and gas hobs have been singled out for their impact on health in the home. It felt surprising to to think about the air inside my home as being subject to the same kinds of pollution I know are damaging health and contributing to the climate crisis outside. Emma Garnett’s work in particular has helped clarify the ambiguity I feel about environmental and health issues relating to air and breathing indoors (Link )
It’s naïve I know but inside always feels like it is safe from the outside world, surely in my birds nest bed I can sequester myself from the threat of climate change and lung disease? I don’t think I am alone in this cognitive dissonance, the sheer delusion that our front door might protect us from the air outside.
I suspect lockdowns complicated this in various ways as we both became more aware of the atmosphere of our homes whilst we were confined to them, but also seeking sanctuary from an air-born virus by keeping ourselves inside. I felt both more vulnerable and more safe inside the great cloak of air inside my home.
Currently our awareness of the environmental and health crises that we contribute to in the way we heat our homes is communicated as a set of fears and dangers. Of course it is important that the extent of atmospheric crisis is made clear to us, and recognising that the environment inside cannot be separated from the climate outside. But I also think we lack a vision of how new kinds of heating, ventilation, and insulation might constitute a re-architecting of our homes. Like the dreamy vision of the music room with the gas stove, we need to see how the decarbonisation of the home might create a new kind of life inside. How will homes be transformed by new ways of heating and cooling our domestic interior?
Superb!