The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began

By Joan DeJean

Categories: Crafts, Hobbies & Home, History

Historian Joan DeJean shows how in Paris between 1670 and 1765 the idea of comfort transformed the home. She traces the invention of the sofa, private bedrooms, flushing toilets, bathrooms, comfortable clothing and informal living spaces, many driven by powerful women such as Madame de Pompadour. DeJean shows how these innovations changed social life and created the modern idea of privacy and casual living we now take for granted.

Recommended by 1 person

• Shane Parrish: “An absolutely fascinating book that relates the development of comfort to social norms that I had mistaken for the human condition. It turns out that we didn’t always want privacy when we went to the bathroom!”