Unlike in many Greek city-states, Roman houses in Italy had no andron or men’s dining room. Men and women dined together with little differentiation between them, though according to Valerius Maximus it was for a time common practice to seat women in chairs rather than have them recline on couches as men did. This custom, however, seems to have mostly died out by his time (1st cent. CE).
Modern “common sense” would have us believe that women’s domestic activities would be kept to the more private parts of the house. Given, however, that weaving generally required a fair amount of light, so it is perhaps unsurprising that evidence of it, usually loom weights, is most often found in the atrium, peristyle or garden, and the smaller rooms off of these spaces. Whether the activity was kept to a time when there might be fewer clients in the house or displayed to show the wife’s diligence is unknown, though the latter seems far more likely.
There are two spaces that can be argued to belong to the paterfamilias more than to anyone else. The first of these is the tablinum, the record room, where he greeted his clients in the morning. From here he dominated the house and though others might enter the room, it was indisputably his space. The others is the small set of highly decorated rooms found just beyond the peristyle garden. Some have argued that these were the women’s quarters, but that would make much more sense in a Greek house. A more convincing argument has been put forth that these were rooms used by the paterfamilias for private business meetings. Their depth within the house, seclusion, and rich decoration both highlight the status of these rooms and make them ideal for these encounters.
The issue of slavery throws another complication into the mix. Slaves cannot be said to have any space of their own in these houses except perhaps the service areas (where they existed), but they went everywhere within them. While some rooms can be tied to certain people or groups of people, gender was not a primary concern in differentiating the house.
*Which are far more likely to have survived than the looms themselves.
Allison, Penelope M. "Engendering Roman Domestic Space." British School at Athens Studies 15 (2007): 343-350.
Hales, Shelley. The Roman House and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. "The Social Structure of the Roman House." Papers of the British School at Rome 56 (1988): 43-97.
Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.