SPECIAL SERIES: Bedrooms of the Royals (part 1)

This is the beginning of a new series about bedrooms. Please bear in mind that I am in no way a historian expert so potential errors and misinterpretations may occur and I would be very pleased if you could correct me. The purpose of this series is simply a peek through the keyhole into something that is normally the most intimate room of a home - at least in modern times - the bedroom.

It was so much fun to do this little research and I want to share with you what I have found. Maybe you will find the one or other idea to dive deeper into this subject and have your own joy in your discoveries.

I love to look at bedrooms because they reveal the most of a person I think. Bedrooms are the most private  rooms of a house. Here you normally show the state of your personality that is masked towards the foreign world. Do I exaggerate? Maybe a bit but only a little bit. Though this applies merely to bedrooms which are actually lived in not the ones which are staged for interior design photography.

A quick look into Wikipedia about the definition of a bedroom just for fun reveals the following:

"A bedroom is a private room where people usually sleep for the night or relax during the day. About one third of our lives are spent sleeping and most of the time we are asleep, we are sleeping in a bedroom.To be considered a bedroom the room needs to have a bed. Bedrooms can range from really simple to fairly complex. Other standard furnishings a typical bedroom usually has are, a closet, nightstand, desk, and dresser. Today in richer countries that have houses with multiple bedrooms, a bathroom may be connected to the bedroom. This did not start happening until the mid to late twentieth century."

Well - royal bedrooms may not be the best examples regarding privacy - they were everything else but private but I thought I would start this series with a kind of extreme after we are used to completely different environments today (depending on where we are).These bedrooms are also highly uncomfortable and embarrassing even in my opinion, cold and gloomy at the same time. You would never know who is watching you. I suppose you need to be born into such a lifestyle to feel at home although some of the royal bedrooms are kept surprisingly simple.

Fontainebleau - France

image source

 Royal-Het-Loo-Palace, Netherlands

image source

Herrenchiemsee - Germany

image source

Green Palace - Tehran

image source

Münchner Residenz - Germany

image source

Buckingham Palace - Great Britain

image source

Jaisalmer Palace - India

image source

Versailles - France

image source

Palace of Udaipur - India

image source

City Palace of Jaipur - India

image source

 Teremnoy Palace -Russia

image source

Kremlin Palace - Russia

image source

Btw it was more difficult  to find images of royal bedrooms from all over the world than I thought. European places have been turned into museums mostly due to the immense costs these places need for restauration and maintenance. The original furniture though is often missing (unfortunately) or has been removed due to make it easier for visitors to access the rooms without destroying the original interieur. Many Indian palaces have been transformed into hotels for the very same reasons. The interiors of south east Asian palaces such as Thai, Burmese and others are hardly accessible as they might be still in use by royal family members, due to religious beliefs or political circumstances.