At Home with the Swans: Breakfast Room

By Heather Green, Visitor Services and Programs Manager at Rose Hill Mansion & Johnston House  

With the arrival of spring, it is time to get Rose Hill and Johnston House ready for opening in May. Going through each room to clean and set out the items for display has me thinking about the different rooms and the needs they fulfilled.

At Rose Hill, we have 20 period rooms you can see on a tour. Some of them are obvious as to their name and usage: bedroom, for instance. Not all are so straightforward though. Sometimes, the names of rooms or their usage changed over time.

It isn’t possible to cover all the rooms in one blog post, so over a few posts, we will take a closer look at some of the rooms inside Rose Hill. We will explore how the Swans used them, how different rooms got their names, and what makes them special.

We’ll start with the Breakfast Room. The idea of a Breakfast Room always intrigued me. Why a separate room just for breakfast? Did the Breakfast Room sit empty most of the day? However, thinking deeper, it doesn’t seem so weird. If you are lucky enough to have both a kitchen and a Dining Room in which to eat, which one do you choose for which meals? Also, breakfast nooks or breakfast bars still exist – often next to another larger, more formal eating area.

There are, of course, practical reasons for having a separate breakfast area. First, a smaller room or table is practical when fewer people are dining together. If I am eating alone or with one other person, it’s more comfortable and easier for conversation to be in a smaller room. The entire Swan family did not eat breakfast at the same time, which meant there was no need for a large table to be set.

Second, the placement of a Breakfast Room tells us a lot. In a world without electric lights, the sun does most of the heavy lifting, even in a house with lamps or chandeliers. Set on the eastern side of the house with large windows, Rose Hill’s Breakfast Room sees a lot of morning light.  

Depending on who you ask, a small room on the eastern side of the house next to the Dining Room could be called either a Breakfast Room or Morning Room. Either way, Breakfast/Morning Rooms are meant to take advantage of the bright morning light. Obviously to eat breakfast by, but the rooms might also be used by the women of the house to write letters or take care of other household accounts: advising servants or planning out the day’s meals.  

With the Back Parlor also located on the eastern side of the house, it would not have been necessary for Mrs. Swan to do her writing in the Breakfast Room, but it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, either. Depending on how the furniture is set, either room could be utilized for this purpose.

This leads us nicely into the history of the Parlor, which we will explore next time.

At Home With The Swans: The Parlors

At Home With the Swans: The Necessary Room

At Home with the Swans: Kitchen

At Home with the Swans: Internal Communication

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