Have you heard of the new trend in housing construction: snore rooms? Neither had I until I read this article by MSNBC.com:

That’s it honey, I’ll be in the snore room

Builders catering to couples who start the night together but end separately

Judy MacDonald faces a near-nightly domestic conflict. When she wakes around 2 a.m. to her husband’s snoring, she has to decide between migrating to another room or toughing it out beside him in bed and watching TV to block out the noise.

If Judy and her husband, Ross, were in the market for a home today, they could snap one up with a feature designed to solve the problem of late-night sleep incompatibility: The snore room.

Builders specializing in communities for “active seniors” over 55, such as PulteGroup’s Del Webb brand and D.R. Horton, are offering new home designs featuring snore rooms near the master bedroom for couples who can’t always catch a good night’s sleep together due to differing schedules, nocturnal habits or medical conditions.

The concept of the snore room isn’t unknown: Celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and “Judge Judy” Scheindlin and her husband, reportedly have snore rooms in their homes. Crowne Plaza, the international hotel chain, began testing “snore absorption” rooms this year to cut down on noise in 10 hotels in European and Middle Eastern locations.

But for 55-and-up communities, the concept of a snore room is an outgrowth of the realities couples like the McDonalds experience: Many older adults get into bed together but wind up unable to make it through the night together.

Indeed,  as many as 23 percent of married couples don’t sleep side-by-side through the night, up from 12 percent in 2001, according to research cited by Del Webb.

“The chat we hear about on the sales floor is often about nocturnal sleeping habits,” says Andy Pfeifer, VP of sales for PulteGroup in Tennessee. “What we’d see happen before we offered our new floor plan option was that one spouse would be relegated to a secondary bedroom…”

Read the rest of this article by MSNBC’s Jane Hodges, in its entirety here: “That’s it honey, I’ll be in the snore room“.