Master bedroom

The term I really regretted losing from my work was "lesbian connector." I found it just such a delightful concept and kind of oddly romantic. Plus, as soon as anyone said it, you knew what they meant, it was really perfectly descriptive.

Our society is becoming very weird.

A perfectly normal word word is used in certain contexts to describe something that is ethically unsavoury, and somehow every usage of the word now acquires these connotations. Like the word is somehow contaminated.

Tell me again we live in a society that isn't superstitious. It's like a kind of ritual contamination.

Likewise we don't say 'plantation' shutters anymore, we just say shutters....

As HeavenlyDay says, plantation shutters are a specific subset of shutter - very different from the default type I'd picture if someone said 'shutters'.

😁 it probably was!

Oh they're were so many little things like that they used to do, but it's the bedrooms that stick in my mind because i remember thinking how furious the new homebuyers on the whole estate were going to be when they started trying to move their beds in and hanging their clothes up. I was furious on their behalf!

in some of them even with the smaller bed you couldn't actually close the bedroom door so the sales staff would stand in front of the bedroom door so people wouldn't be tempted to try and close it!

Do you say 'housewife pillowcase,'?

EdithStourton
One of my friends has an ex show home and all the light fittings are lower than you'd expect. We joke that this was done to make the ceilings seem higher.

I think master bedroom is outdated. I think main or primary bedroom is fine. I've only got 2 equal sized bedrooms so I'd feel silly saying principal bedroom!

Good Lord.
the little coat hangers is the real clincher!

There are different kinds of shutters though. Plantation is useful as it describes the style.

I still say master or sometimes main bedroom. I also say maiden name and Christian name, though so I'm probably just failing on all counts.

I noticed the change to 'primary' on selling sunset, although it's always a suite of rooms. Not just the biggest of 3 miniscule bedrooms in a Victorian terrace with a downstairs loo...

I can understand your perspectives op, but surely even if master was substituted then another word still means the same principle ?

On Selling Sunset (classy TV only here!) it's 'the primary'. I assumed for reasons relating to slavery, not reasons relating to sex.

I expect the chap had good laugh at your expense back at the office.

The woman on Dream Home Makeover on Netflix was always talking about principal bedrooms. I want to say it's Debbie MgGee but that would surely be called Dream Home Magic Makeover. I kept wondering why they never had master bedrooms in the houses, until it finally clicked that they were master bedrooms.

I quite like plantation shutters. As a concept and as a name. I can't be bothered to get offended about historical issues.

Well that simply would not do; estate agents never manage expectations, do they?

They prefer to wildly exaggerate the virtues of the house in the expectation of bamboozling self-doubting viewers. Presumably it works.

Yes it's true. We used to hang the wallpaper horizontally to make the rooms look bigger. We got specially made bedroom furniture to make it look like you could put a double bed and bedside tables in and we used to buy really small coathangers to make the built in wardrobes appear as if you could actually hang clothes in them.

Im.so sorry! I hated that job.

Haven't read all the comments, but I work in property and the 'master' suite is becoming the 'principal' bedroom, nothing to do with male and female and more to do with colonialism. Likewise we don't say 'plantation' shutters anymore, we just say shutters....

@Boiledbeetle
Or if you do check to see which direction the wall paper goes in the show home and check to see of the furniture in the bedrooms is actually proper size and not miraculously made to a smaller size to make the room look bigger.
Is this true? I first heard it in I think the 80s but assumed it was an urban myth.

Given the blatant chicanery that goes on, I would not be surprised...

Speaking as someone who used to build new homes....don't buy one!

Or if you do check to see which direction the wall paper goes in the show home and check to see of the furniture in the bedrooms is actually proper size and not miraculously made to a smaller size to make the room look bigger.

I was once shown a new-build "three-bedroom house" in which the owners were using the third bedroom as a walk-in wardrobe, both because it was far too small for anything else and because the second bedroom was too small to fit an ordinary wardrobe.

YANBU. I have seen this mentioned on FB - the preferred term now is main bedroom. Old masters (for painters) isn't used any more either but I can't remember what has replaced it.

what's the box room now called?

"Compact and bijou, Mostyn; compact and bijou!"

Please simply use "main bedroom" or biggest bedroom instead.

Unfortunately, I think people would assume that you'd used one of those terms as a way of communicating that it's not 'worthy' of being called a 'master bedroom' - to manage people's expectations, i.e. 'well it's nothing special, but I suppose it is technically the biggest'.

Principal would convey the same as master, imho.

What are we thinking about 'bridal suites' in hotels? Are they totally sexist and anachronistic too?!

Principal bedroom is in common usage in the US, master is thought to have raciest origins.

EAs love to use American terms, when did you last see a flat advertised rather than an apartment?

😁
You've reminded me

The sales bumf for my house described the master bedroom as having a walk in wardrobe. It's actually a cupboard with the water immersion tank and two overflow tanks that had a clothes rail badly installed at a height that you could only walk into the cupboard if you are under 5foot tall.

Walk in wardrobe my arse!