Just a Bump in the Beltway

To Have, Hold And Cherish, Until Bedtime
By TRACIE ROZHON

Not since the Victorian age of starched sheets and starchy manners, builders and architects say, have there been so many orders for separate bedrooms. Or separate sleeping nooks. Or his-and-her wings.

In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.

In a survey in February by the National Association of Home Builders, builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the builders association. Some builders say more than a quarter of their new projects already do.

At Escala, a condominium project in Seattle, a quarter of the 270 units have double master bedrooms, said John Midby, a partner in the development. In St. Louis County, Dennis Hayden, president of Hayden Homes, said that each of the 30 detached homes in his latest planned community would have two separate-but-equal bedroom suites.

What could be called the home-sleeping-alone syndrome is not limited to the upper crust. For middle-income homeowners, it may be a matter of moving into a spare bedroom, the recreation room or the den. In the Central West End district of St. Louis, Lana Pepper, a light sleeper who battled for years with her husband’s nocturnal restlessness, reconfigured the condominium they bought recently, adding walls and building closets to create separate bedrooms. Mrs. Pepper said the advantage was obvious: “My husband is still alive. I would have killed him.”

“It was more than snoring,” she said, recounting the bad old days of a shared bed. “He cannot have his feet tucked into any of the covers; I have to have them tucked in. So I took all the linens, and split them with scissors. Then I finished the edge so that half of the sheet would tuck under and the other half he could kick out.”
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According to the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, 75 percent of adults frequently either wake up in the night or snore — and many of them have taken to separate beds just for those reasons. In a report issued Tuesday, the foundation found that more than half the women surveyed, aged 18 to 64, said they slept well only a few nights a week; 43 percent felt their lack of sleep interfered with the next day’s activities.

Anyone who has this much trouble with sleep should be evaluated at a sleep clinic. Sleep apnea can cause heart attacks. This runs in my family and CPAP and BIPAP machines can provide people with a good night's sleep.