I must be behind the curve. I was surfing the Zillow.com site looking for houses for sale in the Low Country of South Carolina and came across one that offered, among other things, a "snoring room." That is the first time I have heard the term. I decided to do a Google search, and it yielded almost 1,600 entries for "snoring room."
More and more couples are asking builders to create a sleeping room off the master bedroom to which one member of the married couplet can flee if her/his mate is making a nocturnal racket. Bob Vila, the guy who renovates old homes on television, calls it both a snoring room and a "sleeping niche."
My wife and I have had something of a snoring room in our Connecticut home for years, we just didn't know that is what it was. I won't give away any marital secrets, but the one of us who doesn't snore - although we accuse each other of it - often gets up in the middle of the night and wanders off to the room just next door. It isn't a true snoring room because it is outside the footprint of the master suite and actually doubles as an office, with a desk and storage cabinets. But it also holds a twin bed and does the trick on nights where no ear plug ever made would be strong enough to hold back the night.
Not everyone, however, is a fan of snoring rooms. As reported in the New York Times earlier this year, Rosalind Cartwright, the lead researcher for something called the Married Couples Sleep Study and the founder of the Sleep Disorders Service and Research Center, prefers that couples first try everything from fitted mouthpieces to a shirt with tennis balls sewn into the back that forces snorers to sleep on their stomachs. She conceded, however, that on her own honeymoon night, her new husband's snoring kept her up all night. Boy, sounds like she married a real tiger.