Somewhere along the line, people decided they needed closets. My 1890 worker house doesn’t have these nasty newfangled spaces. It has square rooms.
In North America, chests, trunks and wall-mounted pegs typically provided storage prior to World War II. Built-in wall closets were uncommon and where they did exist, they tended to be small and shallow. Following World War II, however, deeper, more generously sized closets were introduced to new housing designs, which proved to be very attractive to buyers. It has even been suggested that the closet was a major factor in peoples’ migration to the suburbs.–Wikipedia
Some of those mcmansions have closets larger than most peoples living rooms.