The bedroom is the keeper of the soul, the place where dreams are made and bodies refreshed in sweet, sound sleep. This most intimate of spaces should be the most healthy, hospitable room in your home. Though other rooms can certainly accommodate physical and emotional closeness, this is the room intended for physical intimacy. Yet for all its potential for communion, the bedroom can also be a place of isolation. There's no greater solitude than that suffered during sleepless nights, when our closest allies are fear, apprehension, doubt; in counsel with them, our psyches go into exile. This is genuine solitude, and it reaches into our dreams where our unconscious unreels itself.

The bedroom, then, is the province of contradiction. A place that serves intimacy as well as it does isolation, it accommodates the extremes of human experience. Because whether you call it dreams and sex, or solitude and intimacy, these are the experiences that the bedroom accommodates with the most grace, the walls that form both a narrow cloister for the soul and a gateway to a wider sphere of human exchange.

--From Geography of Home, by Akiko Busch (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)

© 2007 Green Home, Inc.