The tub was in the bedroom because there was no running water, no central heating and no bathroom so the warmest place to strip off and scrub down was by the open fire, well stoked up to a roaring blaze by the little parlour maid, in the bedroom.

As time went by and, flushed with success, outside lavatories came in from the cold, bathrooms became more popular and more accessible to even the poorest of households. The bedroom was for bedding and the bathroom was here to stay.

Then along came a designer who was backward in his forward-thinking. The tub was reinstated in the bedroom and with it came a frisson of excitement and a dash of Hollywood glamour.

You don’t have to take the bed out of the bedroom with these two lateral-thinking ideas either.

Retro kitchen cabinets in off-white, pistacchio and pink, can be fun and used the right way they can be given a new lease of life as a sideboard. Cabinets left over from a kitchen­refit, cleaned up and carried upstairs make fantastic storage units for toys and they're wonderfully resistant to the scuffs, scrapes and spillages that go with the small person's territory.

For a tough guy image, office furniture will help to transform a growing boy's bedroom. The clean lines of a steel cabinet, a functional desk and stacked shelving units will offset nicely the chaos, clutter and all those 'very important things' that threaten to swamp any young lad's lair.