Dormus

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Please ignore the spelling error in the title.

It is a Domus, not a Dormus.

My next project, just started this morning.

A Domus was the house of a Roman Merchant, with a shop or two out the front and a well protected living area behind. There was a lot of crime back in ancient Rome.

They were poorly lit and ventilated for the same reason, windows might let burglars in. Sheet glass for windows wasn't invented yet and it would be another 1000 years before someone invented the chimney. So Roman houses were dark, smoky and smelly.

I'm building this on a very large scale, about 4 nodes to a metre. At this scale I should be able to recreate much of the furniture as well. Hopefully the only mod required will be moreblocks.

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A typical Roman bedroom. They didn't like too much clutter in their rooms.

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This is turning out to be a lot more complex than I first expected.

Here is the kitchen, or Culina, much better lit than it would have been for the slaves preparing food.

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OK. A few days of very busy work are over, now it's time to get back to the fun stuff.

The upper floor and the roof are now in place and it looks very much like the drawing shown on the wiki page, but I don't like it. Much of the floor plan doesn't fit the simple practicalities of life. There are also issues with the physics of the roof.

So there will be some small changes to the way this looks, I'll get around a lot of these issues by making it a very wealthy merchant's Domus, it has a ceiling.

It won't take me too much longer to work out the structure itself but then comes the next challenge, Romans hated plain walls and painted murals on nearly every surface including the ceilings. They loved intricate decorations on all of their furniture and utensils as well.

Some colours in paints required rare and expensive minerals to make them, but black and red were very cheaply made using charcoal and red ochre. So a wealthy merchant's home would have bright and vibrant colours throughout the home but even slaves would paint every surface of their dwellings with whatever they could afford.

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I got the floor and the lighting worked out.

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Domus Floor Plan

The Romans kept a very strict division between their private family life and their public life and this was reflected in the design of their homes. The single story area at the front of the domus was where they held their public life and entertained guests.

They even kept guest bedrooms and a guest dining room for hospitality, only relatives directly related by blood entered the private family areas. This example that I’ve built includes two shops that open onto the street, the owner of the domus would probably run a business in one of them himself and rent the other one out.

This public area of the house also included a shrine to gods that would represent what impression the owner wished to make on visitors, likely gods relating to prosperity and hospitality. There would also be a smaller shrine to the owner’s ancestors, especially if any were famous for power or glory.

The pool in the middle of this area is filled by rain water from the inward sloping roof, it was used for both drinking water and bathing.



The downstairs private area contains the kitchen, storage areas, slave’s quarters and a larger pool fed by rainwater from the inward sloping roof. This was the house water supply, used for drinking, bathing and cleaning.

The slave’s quarters were cramped for space, they all had to share the one room. The kitchens were dark and smoky, chimneys weren’t invented yet and smoke from the ovens had to escape from small grills placed at the top of the wall. The doorways to the kitchens were also a little shorter to try and keep the smoke from going in to the rest of the house.

There were no windows in the ground level of the domus, plate glass for windows wasn’t invented yet and windows would grant easy access for thieves. Even the upper story of the domus would only have windows facing the inner courtyard for the same reason. Windows weren’t for looking out of, they were for letting light in and letting smoke out.

There would also be a shrine to the house gods here, dedicated to whatever gods the owner deemed important to maintaining a happy home.



The upstairs part of the domus is just bedrooms and the Women’s Sanctuary, this area was exclusively for women and small children, males over the age of 10 were strictly forbidden to enter this area. It was a place where women could be themselves and practice whatever hobbies they enjoyed.



Cheers,

Andrew.

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It's coming along.

I've got the slave's Quarters, a Dining Room, and the central family area mostly worked out.

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Hi everyone.

Just to let you know that this project hasn't been dropped. I've been a bit busy lately with some minetest development but I'll come back to this soon.

In the meantime you are more than welcome to come and look at it in it's present state at Bucket World. Just use your minetest to log in to:

minebest.org
port: 30022

(please note minebest is spelled with a "b")

Cheers,

Andrew.