Was the living room called the "death room" around World War I? If so, by whom?

Question

On a Reddit post I recently stumbled across the surprising assertion that the living room was once called the death room, with the explanation being given variously that it's where you would mourn the dead, or it's where you would leave their bodies during times of great death until someone could come along and pick it up.

I looked on Wikipedia and discovered the claim repeated there, with a random blog given as the citation:

The death room

Influenza was rampant after World War 1 and many people lost their lives. Not having the means to bury bodies immediately, and wishing to take the time to mourn, bodies were often stacked in an unused part of the house – typically the Parlor, as most people were not entertaining during these horrible times.

Introducing the living room

When things started looking brighter after the influenza outbreak subsided it began to feel morbid to call this area the death room. Ladies Home Journal – THE magazine of that time – said that with the inevitable return to the socialization and happiness of the days before the outbreak, the death room should be ‘livened’ up and therefore the term living room came to be.

This really, really sets off my bullshit detector, and after a quick Google the only things I can find repeating the claim are random blogs. But I'm really not sure how to verify it — it seems like the sort of thing that could be true, but probably isn't.

Further evidence hinting towards the falseness of this claim is the OED entry for "living-room" (incidentally there is no entry for "death-room"), which while light on the etymology, lists a number of 19th century examples of "living-room" starting from 1825, including some clearly used to refer to a specific room. While this doesn't completely rule out the term "death room" as having existed, it certainly rules out the idea that the term "living-room" was invented in the 1910s, and so casts yet more doubt on the whole story.

1825 Greenhouse Comp. I. 9 No living-room should depend for its ventilation on such of its windows as may communicate with a green-house.

1857 C. Vaux Villas & Cottages 119 Under the living-room is a basement-kitchen.

If it really is true, I'm curious as to where in the world this happened (Britain? America? Specific parts thereof?), for how long it was the case (just during the war or for a significant time before it?), and anything else about the specific cases in which one might have had a "death room".

Answer 1

The 1990 book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America says:

To remove the stigma of death from the home this "death room" became a "living room" by simple decree by the editor of the Ladies Home Journal. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century more and more funerals were being performed in Funeral "Parlors." And the home no longer had a "parlor." The "living room" became a true room for the living.

...

Edward Bok , editor of the Ladies Home Journal , stipulates that room designs for the Journal never show parlors , but rather “ living rooms".

The 1921 book A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After by Edward Bok says at page 136:

and in place of the American parlor , which he considered a useless room , should be substituted either a living - room or a library .

The closest I see in the actual Ladies Home Journal is September 1887:

A really handsome, tasteful parlor - and not a grand apartment by any means, but one that might better, perhaps, be called a "living-room" —is a far rarer sight than a pretty bedroom ; and when not much used, it is too often all piano and carpet. It is to be supposed that there are a few other things in the room; but the piano as large and the carpet loud, and attention is therefore riveted upon them. With dead-white walls for a background, a more unhappy combination could not well be inspired. And all this ugliness, when charming rooms can be had under the most adverse circumstances.

However, the point of Bok in his book is that his house plans would avoid having a "parlor" and instead have a "living room".

So the term "death room" was not used as the permanent name for the room, the issue is between "parlor" and "living room" and Ladies Home Journal avoided "parlors" in favor of "living rooms" prior to the time frame mentioned in the blog.