> Calling them living rooms is a bit of a misnomer for most of them
Living room, family room, and den always confused me when I was a kid. In the States, "living room" means a more formal room for entertaining guests (coffee table with thick art monographs) and it'd often be adjacent to the dining room. In contrast, the "family room" or "den" are places where people would spend most of their time and that's where the television would be.
Don't ask me how the room came to be called "living room" since most people don't spend much time there to the point that some houses would have the couches covered in plastic or bedsheets.
We don't, that i know, have family rooms or dens in the UK, but i have always been a bit confused by the possibility of both living rooms and sitting rooms. There are also lounges, of course, but the kind of people who have lounges certainly don't have sitting rooms. To say nothing of drawing rooms.
There's actually quite a good gallery of British living rooms through the ages in the Geffrye Museum in London, starting from back when they were called parlours. The main thing i remember about it is that the Victorians had fantastically poor taste in interior decoration.
Living room, family room, and den always confused me when I was a kid. In the States, "living room" means a more formal room for entertaining guests (coffee table with thick art monographs) and it'd often be adjacent to the dining room. In contrast, the "family room" or "den" are places where people would spend most of their time and that's where the television would be.
Don't ask me how the room came to be called "living room" since most people don't spend much time there to the point that some houses would have the couches covered in plastic or bedsheets.