Bring back the sleeping balcony

What summer nights! I don’t mean the romance of them, or balmy evenings that have transformed Margate into Monaco. I’m talking about sleep.

Right now, I swelter under the bed clothes, gasping for every breeze that finds its way into my baking bedroom.

I awake with a start, feverish and unrefreshed. there has to be something better than this, and the good news, there is — the sleeping balcony.

Cooling air on the skin. Sleep as nature intended, as though you were under the big skies of the Serengeti. Why hasn’t anyone thought of it before?

Well, they have. there was a vogue for alfresco sleeping during the Edwardian period. they, too, were living at a time of high temperatures: 1911 saw one of the hottest summers on record, and 1914, on the eve of World War I, would be remembered for its golden afternoons.

they devised sun-trap or ‘butterfly’ plans that brought as much sunshine into the house as possible. they threw open the bedroom windows — and a small, but growing, number of people chose not to sleep in a bedroom at all.

the ascetic Lord Leverhulme, who slept the year round under a lean-to awning on the roof of his house, thornton Manor in Cheshire, sometimes woke up with snowflakes drifting across his counterpane.

Sleeping sheds provided an alternative. according to a writer for Country Life in 1910, they had become a conspicuous feature, representing ‘the climax of a grand revolt against the confined and airproof bedrooms of a former age.’

Much more convenient was a verandah on the bedroom floor, such as those at Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire.

Kilteragh in Co. Dublin offered another solution.

there, like Lord Leverhulme, the Irish patriot Sir horace Plunkett (according to the wife of an Irish peer, Lady Fingall) ‘had his own shelter on the roof, with a bed in it, where he slept, summer or winter’— but with the additional refinement of ‘some mechanical device’ by which ‘ he could turn from his bed towards the sun and against the wind’.

Edwin Lutyens often designed sleeping balconies for his clients. they were part of a new attitude that was blurring the distinction between interior space and the outdoors.

Loggias allowed meals to be served and books read in a halfway area, exposed to the air, but with shelter in case of rain.

Under the hand of Gertrude Jekyll and others, Edwardian gardens became a sequence of room-like enclosures, defined