Why do housing space standards matter? Without space standards, landlords, housebuilders and property investors get away with providing tiny or inadequate space in their properties. When there is no agreement on what is acceptable as a minimum size for a property, landlords and housebuilders can do as they please.

In 1961, a Government-commissioned report called Homes for Today and Tomorrow proposed minimum space standards for new housing. The report is more commonly known as the Parker Morris standard and by the end of the 1960s the standard was mandatory for all publicly-funded housing. In 1980, the Conservatives scrapped the standard.

England and Wales have never had mandatory space standards for the private sector. But standards for publicly-funded homes at least set a benchmark from which we can measure the space standards of all homes. And we can rightly criticise new homes that fall below these standards. Many housebuilders and people purchasing property for profit will hate such legislation. Property, in their eyes, is a pure profit-making business. But housing is much more than that. The design of housing affects our health and wellbeing in so many ways. We cannot ignore the importance of design, but equally we cannot ignore the social aspects of housing either.

Just to be clear, we are not talking about palatial space standards here. Even the London Housing Design guide offers a modest increase on what the Parker Morris report recommended over 50 years ago. And these space standards are still lower than other European countries. In Germany, a one-bedroom flat for two people is 20% larger than what the London Housing Design guide recommends.

This graphic is from the RIBA’s Future Homes Commission report published in October 2012

A visitor to this blog recently wrote to me to describe their housing situation. They live in a flat owned by a housing association. The flat was built in the 1920s with two-bedrooms and no bathroom. At some point in the flats’ history it was converted into a three-bedroom flat. The original living room was split in two to make a new bedroom. The kitchen was also split in two to accommodate a tiny bathroom. As you can probably guess by now, this is a very cramped flat. It measures 58 square metres and houses 5 people. The Housing Association thinks this is perfectly fine. They will not re-classify the property as suitable for 3 or 4 people because doing so would mean re-housing the family. It would set a precedent that would probably mean re-housing others too.

The Housing Association readily admits that it does not look at the square footage of a property when considering housing needs. It looks solely at the number of bedrooms and whether that meets the needs of the applicant for the property. Many Housing associations use the same approach when allocating social housing (known as the Bedroom Standard).

By way of comparison, the 50-year-old Parker Morris space standards that were scrapped by the Conservatives in 1980 recommend a 4-person flat to be a minimum of 69.7 square metres. The London Housing design guide recommends a three-bedroom flat for 4 persons to be a minimum of 74 square metres. Click the image below to compare these differences with the three-bedroom 58 square metre flat. It’s clear that counting the number of bedrooms without recourse to the size of a property simply makes no sense.

One thing is certain, we will never get mandatory space standards from the current Lib-Dem/Conservative government. In November 2010, Grant Shapps, the then Housing Minister, scrapped core housing standards drawn up by the Homes & Communities agency. These standards would have applied to any publicly-funded homes. Shapps said:

“There’s no good reason why homes built on public land should be built any differently to those of high quality on private land. So I’m getting rid of this unnecessary requirement, and I’ll be working hard to make sure that, in the long run, the standards that apply to private and public housing are exactly the same.”

In other words, housebuilders are now free to drag all new housing down to their (mostly) miserable standards.

Related posts

Homes for Today and Tomorrow: more on the Parker Morris standards

Space standards and housing design: separate or inseparable?

This post looks at some of the different ways in which the staircase can be placed inside compact terraced homes and two-storey flats, and how this affects the layout of a dwelling.

First of all, how wide should the staircase be? The Lifetime Homes standards – designed to ensure that UK homes are accessible and adaptable – recommend a staircase width of at least 900mm. The London Housing Design Guide (August 2010) also refers to the 900mm measurement as it’s reference point. Some examples from the guide are shown below.

In a terraced house, the most familiar layout for a staircase is in a separate hallway located at the side of the house. However, as the examples above show, the amount of space required for this arrangement can be substantial, particularly for a house or flat with a narrow frontage (such as 4 metres).

In The Housing Design Handbook, author David Levitt (of Levitt Bernstein architects) notes that much terraced housing built in the UK over the past 50 years has a 5 or 6 metre internal frontage. This is wide enough to accommodate simple, practical layouts that suit a wide range of families and households. However, it is not the most efficient in terms of land usage.

The push for greater density means that homebuilders and architects are exploring the possibilities of narrower frontage homes and even single aspect houses. (The single aspect house does not necessarily need a narrow frontage, but we should not be building single aspect houses at all in my view.)

The three floor plans below, taken from The Housing Design Handbook, show example layouts for a terraced house, each with a different frontage. The abbreviation LTH refers to compliance with the Lifetime Homes standard.

It’s noticeable that the staircase in examples B and C above will receive little to no natural light (unless a roof light can be installed directly above the staircase). Both these house types are limited in the layouts they can adopt as acknowledged in the Housing Design Handbook:

“…each of these…has significant quirks or limitations rendering them far less suitable as fully-accessible, general needs homes that can be fully occupied and amenable to almost any orientation.”

Below is another example of how the wide terraced house opens up layout possibilities. This floor plan is similar in some ways to example A above but has a better layout in my opinion.

The ground floor arrangement doesn’t work in all orientations however. If the house is south-facing and the living room is placed at the front of the house, the entrance will lead directly into the living room.

The house above was designed by Elizabeth Denby and exhibited at the Ideal Home Exhibition in London in 1939. Denby was an architect and social reformer. Her design was modelled on a 1932 development in Stockholm by the Swedish architect Paul Hedqvist.

Get rid of the hallway?

The hallway tends to be a transitory space that people pass through. But it is not dead space as some may argue and serves some useful purposes:

• privacy between rooms (i.e. circulation is through the hallway, not through rooms)
• a sense of transition between rooms.
• a space to greet visitors and guests;
• a storage space.

However, when a house has a narrow frontage, the priority is to maximise space for living and that often means dispensing with a traditional hallway and rethinking the position of the staircase.

Architecture firm Proctor and Matthews produced a series of layouts for two, three and four bedroom terraced homes for a development in Newhall in Harlow. Below is the layout for a two-bedroom terraced house.

By placing the stairs in the middle of the plan, they have created two distinct (but narrow) spaces on either side of the staircase which can be used for different purposes. The staircase is used to partition the open plan space into different areas but without the need for a traditional hallway that would not have fitted into the available space.

You can read more about this house (and see more floorplans and photos of the interior) in a separate post: Do we need to re-think the layout of terraced houses?

Light from above

Back in 2005, the Homes and Communities agency (formerly English Partnerships) launched a housing competition called Design for Manufacture to design a house for £60,000. One of the winning entries was by a consortium of companies called SixtyK. This included the architects Sheppard Robson. Their design for a narrow terraced house includes an open-plan ground floor with the staircase near the centre of the plan. The house features a roof lantern directly above the staircase. This provides daylight and passive ventilation. Daylight from the roof lantern penetrates to the ground floor allowing the house to be positioned in any orientation.

Click the image below for a larger view of the floorplan.

In the same competition, another winning entry by architects PCKO features a strip of glazing across the top of a terraced house that provides light from above. (Will water collect when it rains though?)

Minimising the footprint of a staircase

Another approach to freeing up space is to minimise the footprint of the staircase. A spiral staircase has a more compact form than a traditional straight flight of stairs. However, it is more expensive and not always a practical alternative. For example, the ability to easily transport furniture between floors can be difficult or impossible with a spiral staircase. Although transporting furniture may not be a frequent activity, it will almost certainly be required at some point in a household.

When the Swiss architect Le Corbusier designed his Unite D’Habitation (Housing Unit) in Marseille (completed in 1952), the duplex apartments had a narrow width of just 3.66 metres. The apartments feature an open staircase (without risers) designed by the French designer Jean Prouve.

Photos from property website: http://www.espaces-atypiques-marseille.com

A similar approach was used in the Golden Lane Housing Estate in the City of London. The estate was formally opened in 1957 (although still unfinished) and was designed by the architecture practice Chamberlin, Powell & Bonn. The estate was noteworthy for making the maisonette (multi-storey flat) fashionable. Additional space was gained by using an open, cantilevered stairwell.

Photo by John Maltby

As always with housing, pressure on costs means the cheapest solutions are often favoured over more useful or practical layouts. But even within the constraints of the narrow-frontage house or flat, there are surprisingly varied ways in which to arrange the layout.

Related post

Do we need to re-think the design of terraced houses?

I thought it might be interesting to revisit a question implied in my first blog post five years ago: does domestic or volume housing fall under the field of architecture? It’s not a rhetorical question. Most of the built environment is housing and for much of the past few hundred years the majority of domestic housing has not been designed by architects. That was the surprising fact (to me at least) that launched this blog five years ago. (See the first blog post Architecture and Domestic Housing for more on this.)

In Britain, architects had their greatest influence on housing in the decades after the Second World War, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. But post-war housing in Britain has a very mixed legacy of success and failure. Many failed housing projects, particularly large-scale high density developments, have not endeared architects to the public.

In contrast to mass housing (where the mass of us live), the individual house receives far greater attention in architectural history. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Every architect (and student of architecture) will be familiar with these.

“The design of the house has acquired a prominent place in architectural history. But ‘house’ and ‘housing’ are not the same thing. While the historians of design lavished attention on the mansions and palaces of the rich they paid little heed to the everyday architecture which surrounded them – the mass of domestic buildings that were home to everyone else and which together constituted housing.”
…
“While housing can be for the rich – the Georgian terrace of the past, the urban penthouse of today – most often it is not. Housing is for everyone. It has to be affordable and, for the most part, that means modest. Spaces are small-scale and limited in number. They are divided into well-understood functions. Materials and components have to be relatively cheap. This means that plans can be standardised and components mass produced.”

From: An Introduction to Urban Housing Design: At Home in City by Graham Towers

Architects are often missing in debates about housing, even when they have much to contribute. It’s often impossible to separate social, cultural and political issues when discussing housing matters. Are architects wary of wading into these topics?

Last year (2011), the RIBA launched a high profile campaign for better homes called Homewise. The campaign kicked off with some critical findings about the homes built by some of the largest volume housebuilders in Britain. It was a much needed and welcome contribution to the housing debate but some architects felt the campaign would alienate the housebuilders further from the architecture profession. Was this a case of don’t bite the hand that feeds you?

I don’t really have any sympathy for the volume housebuilders. The design of new build housing remains poor in Britain and deserves much more critical scrutiny. One of the reasons the housebuilders get away with poor design must surely be the ruinous attitude of regarding a home as just another commodity to be bought and sold as a pure profit-making exercise. Property investors and buy-to-let landlords have done much to cultivate this damaging attitude in Britain.

At the start of this post I asked if domestic housing is part of architecture, and the answer is obviously yes. But it is also true that mass housing receives less attention and less critical discussion in the architecture field than other building types. Why? It really does seem as if housing is the lowest form of architecture.

When architects describe other buildings, they talk about scale and proportion and natural light. You’ll be lucky to hear those words in relation to mass housing (and if they are used, it will probably be in a negative sense – miserly proportions, poor natural light). Is there any other building type subject to so many cost, material and space constraints as housing?

Volume housing will rarely be iconic or glamorous in the way that large public or commercial buildings might be designed. But that hardly means that housing should not be worthy of the same or greater attention than those buildings. Is there anything more satisfying than participating in the design of high-density houses or flats that are loved by their occupants and that stand the test of time for decades afterwards? After all, what other building type contributes as much to our health, comfort and wellbeing?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of open plan layouts?

Advantages

Better use of space?

Open plan layouts help give a greater sense of space by combining different rooms (kitchen, dining and living) into one area.

More social?

The kitchen is often described as the heart of the home nowadays – a place to socialise as well as to cook. (Whether this actually represents reality is another matter!) Connecting the kitchen to the living room facilitates this idea of a social space.

Entertaining guests might feel easier or more convivial in an open plan design: you can continue chatting to your guests while you prepare something in the kitchen.

Similarly, if you have young children, an open plan layout can help you keep an eye on them while you work in the kitchen.

Light

In a double or dual-aspect home (i.e. with windows at the front and back of the house or flat), an open plan layout lets light flood in from two directions. In fact, creating a light and airy space is often touted as one of the principal advantages of open plan designs. Of course, you can have ‘light and airy’ rooms without them being open plan. And not all open plan layouts are light and spacious either.

Would you still opt for an open plan layout even if every room in your home felt light and airy? A layout where you can close off rooms with sliding partitions will only work if the rooms still feel spacious when they’re closed off.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages to open plan layouts, some of which relate more to personal preference and habits.

Noise and cooking smells

Noise and smells from the kitchen can intrude into the living room when you have a combined kitchen and living space. This might not be a problem if you live by yourself, but if you share your home with someone else, will the noise from the kitchen disturb their activities? If you have a washing machine in your kitchen, the noise will be particularly intrusive. Even appliances like a refrigerator emit a low but audible hum.

Heating

In winter, you will be heating the entire open plan space even when parts of that space (such as the kitchen) are not in use.

Clutter

Any clutter or mess in the kitchen won’t be hidden from view (not necessarily a problem for everyone)

Lack of privacy?

Sometimes an open plan layout can give you a feeling of too little privacy when you share your home with others. I mentioned earlier the example of keeping an eye on young children and how an open plan space can help in this regard. But what if you share your home with adults or teenagers? Would you prefer more separate spaces in this type of situation (e.g. a kitchen/dining room separate from the living room)? In an open plan home, if the bedroom becomes the only place to retreat from other household members, is that enough?

I think these advantages and disadvantages show that open plan living doesn’t suit everyone. Can any one design ever satisfy all these different needs?

Open plan flat layouts

Open plan flat layouts can be designed with many different variations. The shape of the dwelling will affect the type of open plan layout possible.

Here is a common shape for a new build, one bedroom flat:

How would you lay out the interior so it includes a bathroom, kitchen, bedroom and some storage space? Would the layout be roughly similar to this?

The floorplan above is a typical layout used by the volume housebuilders. Is it possible to design anything other than this layout (with minor variations) given the flat’s single aspect constraint and the proportions of the space? Probably not. Perhaps that explains why architect-designed schemes tend to use the same layout too.

A collection of one bed flat designs. Click for a larger view. This graphic is from a previous post on templates for housing design.

Here’s a photo of a fairly typical open plan, single-aspect flat. This is from an architect-designed apartment block. Is it unfair to describe this as a living room with a bunch of kitchen cabinets thrown across the back?

This picture was taken from a property website. The picture appears to be distorted to give the impression of a room larger than it actually is.

The floorplan below is from a 1930s flat from an apartment block in North-west London. Would you choose this layout over the open plan design above? (I would!)

If we remove the interior layout of this 1930s flat we can immediately see that the shape of this space, with its wide frontage, offers much greater design possibilities than the narrow frontage flat we looked at previously.

Below is a layout for a one bedroom (single aspect) flat by Swedish practice White Arkitekter. This is just one apartment in a wider design of houses and apartment blocks that will form part of a residential development in Salford.

Like the 1930s flat, this apartment also has a wide frontage. Here the kitchen is connected to the living room but retains some sense of being separate. The kitchen is also exposed to natural light and ventilation and leads directly onto the balcony (recessed to retain privacy).

Below is another flat design, this time from a volume housebuilder. You can see here that even a small increase in the frontage of the apartment opens up additional layout options: the kitchen here has it’s own window too.

Here’s our original single aspect one bedroom flat. If we can’t change the narrow frontage but we can make the flat dual aspect (i.e. with windows at the front and back of the flat), what design possibilities does that open up?

Here’s an example of a double-aspect flat with a short frontage (and long length). It was designed by the German architect Heinrich Lauterbach and built as part of a prototype housing estate in the German town of Crailsheim in 1950. These were homes of small size and low cost construction. The estate was sponsored by the Building and Housing Research Association, Stuttgart.

The double aspect nature of this flat makes a big difference to it’s layout when compared with the single aspect layout from earlier. The rooms are connected with sliding doors to open up the small spaces. There is no bathroom in this layout, just a toilet or WC. Bathrooms were housed separately in the basement of the housing block and shared by several families. Obviously this would be unacceptable today, but this flat design could easily be adapted to include a bathroom without a radical change in layout. Overall, this 1950s flat seems much more appealing and better designed than the single aspect flats so common today.

Mass or volume housebuilding will always give us homes of small or modest size. Do the volume housebuilders give us open plan layouts because it represents the best possible design solution? Or because it’s the cheapest option for them?

Tour Bois-le-Pretre. Photo by Frédéric Druot.

Here is a wonderful and inspiring example of how a 1960s social housing block in Paris called Tour Bois-le-Pretre has been transformed through a remarkable renovation effort. Three French architects – Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton, and Jean Philippe Vassal – had the foresight and imagination to propose an inspired alternative to demolition: one that would give each apartment more natural light, more space and cut energy costs.

Tour Bois-le-Pretre was designed by the French architect Raymond Lopez and completed in the early 1960s. It is 50 metres high and has 16 storeys. The tower originally had 96 apartments but the recent renovation has added another four units.

Tour Bois-le-Pretre by Raymond Lopez during its original construction. Photo: Pavillon de l'Arsenal

In 1990 the original facade was unsympathetically renovated to improve insulation. Not only did this the give the building an unattractive appearance, more severely it reduced the amount of natural light entering each apartment. (To minimise heat loss, apartments were fitted with smaller windows.)

Tour Bois-le-Prete facade from the 1990 renovation. Photos by Frédéric Druot, Lacaton and Vassal.

Then in 2005, Paris Habitat, the Paris Office for Public Housing, ran a competition to renovate the building. One of the competition constraints was that the building could not be expanded to take up more land: any renovation would need to keep to the building’s existing foorprint.

The competition was won by Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton, and Jean Philippe Vassal. They proposed removing the facade of each apartment and bolting on glass balconies or “winter gardens” (similar to a conservatory). The winter gardens measure 7.5 by 3 metres and have been attached to the outside of the tower block without altering the original structure.

The "bolt-on" balconies in Tour Bois-le-Pretre. Picture copyright by Frédéric Druot, Lacaton and Vassal

The "winter garden" balconies. Photo by Frédéric Druot.

In each apartment the living room has been fitted with floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors. These doors lead into the winter garden. The result is an increase in the amount of natural light and the amount of usable space. You can see the remarkable transformation this has had on the apartments in the before-and-after pictures below.

Tour Bois-le-Pretre: before-and-after transformation of an apartment. Photos by Frédéric Druot, Lacaton and Vassal.

The ground floor reception or lobby area has also been renovated and two new lifts installed.

Bois le Prete: before-and-after transformation of the ground floor. Photos by Frédéric Druot.

Remarkably, all this cost less than demolishing the tower and building again from scratch. The final cost of the renovation was €11.2 million. It was estimated that demolition and building a new structure would have cost at least €20 million.

The architects involved the residents closely with the new design and uniquely the residents remained in the tower block during renovation instead of being re-housed elsewhere.

Bois le Prete. Photo by Frédéric Druot

The renovation of Bois-le-Pretre has generated a lot of interest and deservedly so. Here in Britain, the parallels are obvious. We have many unloved 1960s and 70s housing estates that prompt the same question: can renovation rehabilitate these estates, or do we demolish them? Architects don’t always argue persuasively about the design and quality of the living spaces in these unpopular housing blocks. The abstract architectural language sometimes used to defend these estates leaves the public cold and unconvinced (see the post on Robin Hood Gardens for an example of this).

I greatly admire the ambitions of the architects who worked on this renovation. Although they undoubtedly wished to make the appearance of the building more pleasant (and the facade is indeed attractive), from the outset their principal concern was to improve the living conditions of the residents. Their focus was therefore on the features that would do this such as more space and more natural light for each apartment. This is a refreshing change from many housing projects where greater effort seems to be expended on the facade than the quality of the interior spaces.

Related links

You can see many more photos of Tour Bois-le-Pretre on the websites of the architects Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton, and Jean Philippe Vassal:

• Frédéric Druot
• Lacaton and Vassal

Interview with the architects – a short video interview in French (with English subtitles)

Daylight & Architecture: Issue 16 (PDF, 6.6 mb)
A magazine by Velux which features an excellent article on Tour Bois-le-Pretre on page 59. Also included are interviews with two residents of the block.
“The transformation of the Bois le Prêtre tower is causing a stir in the Parisian landscape. Its visual impact has opened up a sensitive debate on the economic and architectural issues involved in revamping existing social housing stock. The project shows the spectacular results that can be achieved when performance and pleasure are introduced to a building where these features have never been known.”

Transformation of Tour Bois-le-Pretre
An overview of Tour Bois-le-Pretre from a 2010 exhibition at the MOMA in New York (this was when the renovation was underway but before it had completed).