The bedside drawer is a peculiar architectural feature.
It is, in most homes, the smallest piece of furniture in the most private room. It sits within arm's reach of the bed, holds objects too personal for the bathroom and too intimate for the living room, and is opened — generally — only by the person who sleeps on that side of the mattress. Its contents are seen by almost no one. They are designed, often, as if they will be seen by everyone.
This is the tension the bedside drawer has lived with for about a hundred and twenty years, and the history of what's inside it is, on close reading, a history of how brands have chosen to address the people who actually use them.
What the drawer used to hold
In nineteenth-century Europe, the bedside table was called a commode de chevet in France and a night-table in English. Its primary contents were a candle, a watch, a book, and — in any household of means — a chamber pot. The objects were domestic, religious and practical. They were not pretending to be anything other than what they were.
By the early twentieth century, indoor plumbing had removed the chamber pot, and the drawer became something different: a small repository for the things you wanted within reach but not on display. Reading glasses. A clock. A novel. Letters. A photograph.
The first product designed specifically for that drawer, in any commercial sense, was probably the condom. Trojan, launched in New York in 1916, was branded with a helmet and packaged in a way that — even now — telegraphs counter display more than bedroom. The aesthetic of mass-market intimate products was set early, and it was set to communicate one message: use this in private; do not let it tell on you.
This is the inheritance most contemporary intimate brands are still working against.
The long middle
For most of the twentieth century, nothing much changed. The drawer's intimate contents were sold through pharmacies, mail order, and eventually a retail format that made its own discomfort into a kind of theme — blacked-out windows, neon, an interior designed so that nobody would linger.
The design language followed the retail format. Packaging shouted or apologised. Colour palettes were either medicinal or lurid. Materials were chosen for cost, since nobody was going to examine them in good light. There was no reason to make the object beautiful, because the object was never meant to be seen.
The result was a category of things that people owned and hid, which is a strange relationship to have with an object you bought on purpose.
What changed
The shift, over the last fifteen years or so, has been quiet but substantial.
In the late 2000s, a small set of design-led brands began asking a question the category had not seriously asked before: what would happen if the object were as well designed as the lamp on the table next to it?
The first answers were modest. Better packaging. More restrained typography. A move away from the gendered palettes that had dominated for decades — the medicinal blues and pinks, the apologetic clinical white. By the mid-2010s the answers had become more ambitious, and the argument had been made in public by enough brands that it stopped sounding eccentric: an object could be both functional and beautiful, and the beauty was not a flourish but a consequential design decision.
Specifically: an object that looks like it belongs on the bedside table is more likely to actually live there. An object that looks like it belongs in a drawer will be put in the drawer, and what is put in the drawer is what is forgotten.
The implication is not subtle. The design of intimate objects is not a cosmetic concern. It is a usage concern.
Why the history matters
Imperia exists, in part, because the bedside drawer should not be embarrassed. That is not a design preference. It is the conclusion the history points at.
A product that looks like it belongs in the room gets used in the room. A product that gets used in the room becomes part of the room's daily vocabulary, rather than a thing summoned from a drawer in a moment of self-conscious ceremony. The difference between summoning a product and reaching for an object that lives there is the difference between intimacy as an event and intimacy as part of the architecture of a life.
A hundred and twenty years of packaging taught people to hide these objects. It is worth knowing that the flinch was manufactured, and fairly recently, by an industry that found it easier to sell to embarrassment than to design its way out of it.
A final note
The bedside drawer has been a private object for about a hundred and twenty years. It will remain one. What changes — what we are interested in changing — is what the drawer feels like to its owner.
Specifically: whether opening it produces a small wince of that's a thing I'd rather a guest not see, or whether it produces nothing at all, because there is nothing to wince about.
That is a question about what you keep and why, rather than a question about history. We've written about it separately: on what actually earns its place in the drawer, and how to clear out what doesn't.
