Bring back the scullery: The forgotten rooms of historic country houses

‘A woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms,’ declared the author, Edith Wharton. Family and visitors pass through most, but some rooms remain hidden and unknown despite being ‘full of treasures and wonders’.

Perhaps the same may be said of the country house itself, where a rich vocabulary of rooms lies half-forgotten now that modern life has reconfigured its architecture. Gone are the army of servants that once buzzed in and out of carefully compartmentalised spaces: sauceries, spiceries, brush rooms and butteries — former hives of activity that have long since been repurposed or subsumed into open-plan designs.

Yet the humble scullery, we hear, is staging a comeback. This small back kitchen, where fish were gutted and pots were scoured, was once one of the country house’s grubbiest rooms, and the scullion — and later scullery maid — who toiled there, the lowliest of servants.

Staff or no staff, I’m all for reintroducing it. The clutter and clatter of washing up, and the muddy vegetables that, when scrubbed, splatter the tiles like a Pollock painting, require a new home now that the kitchen has become a popular place to dine and gather.

But if a scullery feels too passé, might I suggest a ‘scrollery’? It’s a dedicated sound-proofed den of my own invention: a place to direct residents playing videos on their mobile phones, which restores peace to the rest of the house. And why not extend the concept to trains in place of the old smoking carriages?

As for bringing back a designated ‘smoking room’, conceived by the Victorians to avoid polluting the rest of the household with bad smells and ‘man talk’, this reformed smoker is unconvinced. I suspect it’s the sort of space that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had in mind in The Lost World when he described the Piccadilly salon of Lord John Roxon as offering ‘extraordinary comfort and elegance combined with an atmosphere of masculine virility’ — and part of that sentence puts me off.

The 3^rd Marquess of Bute, however, was a big fan. He commissioned two smoking rooms for Cardiff Castle, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’, which could be enjoyed according to the seasons. The lavish, kaleidoscopic decoration of the former, designed by William Burges and located in the clock tower’s apex, was almost certainly influenced by his architect’s penchant for opium. It all feels far too decadent for today. Perhaps, in this age of anxiety, a ‘stroking’ rather than ‘smoking’ room, where pampered pets get undivided attention, is a fitting substitution.

Besides, there are other decommissioned rooms higher up my wish list. I fancy the idea of a ‘still room’ and visualise myself in a floral apron pickling and distilling the bounty of my unintentionally rewilded garden. I would start the day in my east-facing ‘morning room’, shifting to the ‘withdrawing room’ as the sun moved around the house. And if life got too much, I could drape myself across the chaise longue of my Victorian ‘fainting room’ and take smelling salts until I felt fit to seek company.

There are some spaces that are clearly obsolete. Take the ‘muniment room’, for example. Unless you’re Magdalen College, Oxford, whose Muniment Tower houses thousands of medieval deeds relating to its vast estate, your data is mostly digital. A ‘server room’, contained within a faraday cage to fend off hostile intelligences of an artificial nature, is a more future-proof solution.

For other rooms, it’s less cut and dry. The ‘lumber room’, a place for timber and disused furniture, gets mixed reviews in literature. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), it’s a room ‘to perish in obscurity’, while in Saki’s short story The Lumber Room (1914) it’s a mysterious place where young Nicholas discovers ‘wonderful things for the eye to feast on’: ‘a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in wonderful colours’ and ‘twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes’ — all hidden away by his vindictive aunt who was ‘one of those people who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them.’

Dickens had plenty of thoughts about rooms. While Scrooge’s lumber room is an unprepossessing space containing an ‘old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish baskets, [a] washing-stand on three legs, and a poker’, the warm-hearted Mr Jarndyce in Bleak House owes much of his good nature to his ‘growlery’. Part library, part boot room, it’s a small space for recomposing oneself and casting off a bad mood. ‘When I am out of humour, I come and growl here,’ he explains. Aristocratic women in 18th-century France already had such a sanctuary in the form of the boudoir, taken from the verb bouder, meaning to sulk or pout.

A room of one’s own, à mon avis, is a marvellous thing, especially if it has a pile of crossword puzzles and a small fridge containing chocolate. Whatever we call it, in the interest of domestic harmony, let’s reinstate it without delay.