When discussing the power balances between the genders, European and North American debates in gender sociology have mostly been circling around the gendered nature of the household division of labour. In both debates, the importance of architecture and space is obvious. Women’s work is perceived as unpaid care work in the sphere of reproduction and localized as domestic work at home (Hausarbeit), whereas men’s paid work is associated with the sphere of productive work at the workplace outside the home (Arbeitsort). However, little attention is paid to the complex interdependencies between materiality, cultural aspects, and historical trajectories and how they are structuring gender balances in different societies. Norbert Elias is one of the few classical sociologists who underlined the role of architecture. While Elias only hinted at gender relationships and architecture, for example, in the court society, his colleague and contemporary Margarethe Freudenthal worked on the dynamics of gender relations and the role of housing architecture in the developing bourgeois society in Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Integrating these bodies of work and using the concept of the refiguration of spaces as an overarching frame, we show how the power balances between the genders are reflected and structured in and through architecture. According to Elias, architectural structures are always in line with a specific society—implying that the dynamic relationships between the genders and architecture differ between societies. In order to illustrate this point, we will compare Germany with Kenya as a contrasting society.