A Room at Twenty-Three Degrees, and Why It Matters

Ask what ruins an hour and most people would guess at nerves, or timing, or the wrong choice of format. In practice the commonest quiet spoiler is that the room was two degrees too cold and nobody said anything.

What cold does

It produces a posture. Shoulders come up, the jaw sets, the breathing goes shallow and high, and the whole body braces. That posture is the exact opposite of what the next hour is trying to produce, and it takes real time to undo once it has set in.

Here is the part that matters for a site written about body confidence: self-consciousness produces the same posture. A guest who is uneasy about being uncovered holds himself the same way a cold guest does, and the two reinforce each other. A nervous man in a cool room is fighting on two fronts, and one of those fronts could have been closed for nothing thirty minutes earlier by turning a dial.

The number

Warmer than you would choose for sleeping and warmer than feels sensible while you are dressed. Somewhere around twenty-three degrees is comfortable for a person with nothing on and slightly stuffy for a person in a shirt. Aim for slightly stuffy while dressed and you have it right.

Turn it up half an hour before rather than when she arrives, because rooms heat slowly and the thermostat reaching a number is not the same as the walls, the floor and the bedding reaching it.

Amsterdam rooms and their particular obstacles

Several things conspire here. Older hotels often run on a building system where the room dial has limited authority. Windows in the centre are frequently single glazed and somebody has usually left one on the latch. Bathrooms are tiled and cold and their doors get left open. Canal houses have floors that were laid a long time ago and draughts that come up through them.

The fixes are unglamorous and they work. Shut the window properly. Shut the bathroom door. Put the towels on the radiator rather than the rail so they are warm when they are wanted. If the floor is the surface, a sheet and enough towels between you and it makes more difference than the air temperature does, because a cold floor pulls heat out of a body faster than cold air.

Warm towels

This is the highest-return thing on the list and it costs nothing. Towels that have been on a radiator for twenty minutes change the first few minutes of a session completely, and they change it most for the guest who was dreading exactly those minutes. A warm towel is permission to stop bracing.

Ask housekeeping for a few extra in the afternoon, put half of them to warm, and keep the rest for the floor.

The one to avoid

Do not solve the temperature by turning all the lights off and hoping the dark feels warmer. It does not, and a fully dark room brings its own problems: it reads as shame rather than atmosphere, it makes moving around a room with oil and towels in it harder than it needs to be, and it removes one of the ordinary pleasures of the thing. One low lamp and a warm room is the combination. Darkness and a cold room is the combination people actually produce when they are anxious, and it is the worst of both.

Saying it out loud

If the room is cold when she arrives and you did not manage to fix it, say so in the first minute rather than enduring it for forty. It is a completely ordinary sentence, it produces an immediate practical response, and it is far better than a session in which one person is quietly rigid and the other is working out why.

The same applies mid-session. A room that was right at the start can be wrong twenty minutes later, once you have been still for a while. Saying so is not a complaint and nobody hears it as one.

The reverse case

Rooms can also be too warm, and in July, in a top-floor room under the eaves, they frequently are. That is a smaller problem with an easier fix: open the window for ten minutes an hour beforehand, then close it. What does not work is leaving it open throughout, because a draught across a still body cools it in exactly the way the heating was meant to prevent, and a canal-side window brings its own soundtrack at eleven at night.