Your home… with living:room

The Model T - 'Any colour... so long as it's black'

Back in 1909, when Henry Ford was asked what colour his new motor car – the Model T – was available in, he replied, ‘Any customer can have the car painted any colour he wants, so long as it’s black.’

A hundred years later and things have moved on. It’s the age of the iPhone – a multi-media communication system that can be an entertainment centre, with access to our favourite music & movies, or a mobile office, allowing us to conduct business whenever, wherever – all at the click of a button. Now, what colour of button would you like?

Unlike ole Henry, Apple puts the customer firmly in the driving seat – we pick the phone, choose the applications – hey presto, we get what we want.

When it comes to buying our homes, however, we’re not so lucky. New research by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) shows that much of new housing built in the UK is not fit for the demands of 21^st Century living. When we spend the largest part of our lives in our homes, isn’t it about time we approached the way we design and build them less like a Model T Ford and more like an iPhone?

According to the survey, based on 2,249 new houses built in the UK from 2003 – 2006, 44% of owners found their kitchen too small for cooking, 37% don’t have enough living space and a whopping 57% don’t have enough storage space in their homes. Providing adequate storage in new housing has long been a bugbear of mine, so don’t get me started. British houses are now the smallest in Europe and the CABE report identifies a need for higher space standards enforced by local planning departments.

But are bigger houses really the answer?

Building bigger presents other problems in a time of scarce materials, rising fuel costs and an increasing need for sustainable use of land. In a recent post, The Elephant in the Room 2: Spaced Out, I talked about a 40sqm apartment in Paris that is home to a family of 4 and their dog – it’s a beautiful home that has been designed to work for them and where every square inch of available space is put to good use.

Is the problem then with new housing lack of space or simply poor design?

CABE point to physical size as the culprit here yet the survey itself is not based on the vital statistics of houses but on how homeowners feel about the space they have – it measures the quality of the experience of living in their homes, not their size.

And when has size ever been a measure of quality, anyway?

The way we read space can be changed and manipulated, even if we don’t realise it. A room with a dark colour on the walls will appear smaller than one with a light colour; lots of natural light makes a small room look spacious and low ceilings make a large room seem cramped. The current trend for bulky ‘corner’ sofas is a case in point – it may give off the sophisticated Manhattan loft vibe, a la ‘Friends’, in the furniture showroom but in the average home it becomes more like an assault course on the Krypton Factor.

Light and dark affect our visual perception of a space

The way we feel about the space we live in is another moveable feast, influenced by factors that often have very little to do with its size:

• Did we live in a larger or smaller house prior to this one?
• Are we experiencing lifestyle changes that also change our expectations from our home – getting married, the birth of a child, becoming self-employed or unemployed?
• Do we like the neighbourhood and the neighbours?
• Have the neighbours we don’t like just extended their house to make it twice as big as ours?

Any one of these can change how we feel about our home on a given day.

Another problem with minimum space standards is that there is more variety in our lifestyles than ever before and this is not addressed by the traditional labels we put on our homes – bedroom, living room, dining room. When our housing options include studio apartments, lofts, work-live units, houseboats, warehouses, community housing and countless other unorthodox types of home, do we need to think about ‘rooms’ at all?

I remember reading once about a man who bought a broom cupboard in the Dakota Building, overlooking Central Park in New York (the building, that is, not the cupboard) – it had enough space for a bed & his clothes and that was all he really needed for his City stopovers. It’s a great example of lateral thinking and for the fraction of the cost of an apartment he lays his head and collects his mail at one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan!

Location Location Location!

It may seem extreme, even a little Harry Potter-esque, but he’s not alone. TV programmes like Channel 4′s ‘Relocation, Relocation’, with Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, focus exclusively on homeowners down-sizing in city locations to create a higher quality (there’s that word again) of life for themselves in the countryside. Shouldn’t we, as buyers have the choice to opt for compact living arrangements, particularly in areas with highly competitive housing markets, if that’s what works for us?

The challenge now, as it has always has been with housing, is how to:

• create home environments that we enjoy living in, regardless of size -
• that work the way we need them to work -
• are sensitive to environmental issues, both at a local and a global scale -
• are flexible enough to meet the wide range of demands and expectations we have of them (these varying from person to person and changing all the time) -
• and do all of this across different age groups, family sizes, income levels and social brackets…

Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Well, the typical housing developer would most likely agree and few of them even try. It’s more cost-effective for a developer to build as few ‘types’ of house as possible and much easier to convince us to buy what they build, than to figure out how to build the kind of houses we might want to live in – and still make a profit. Developer-built modern housing is the Model T Ford – not what we want but what choice do we have?

One –off housing, designed for a specific owner, is more successful in hitting the quality criteria and often more innovative in its approach. Japanese architect, Kazuyo Sejima, designed ‘House in a Plum Grove’ in Tokyo, ignoring traditional room conventions, and arranging the layout around the number and type of activities that would take place there, instead. Each activity space is linked so the whole house acts like one large room with lots of smaller spaces off – the family can interact or withdraw, as they choose.

House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo (Photo by Axel Vansteenkiste)

Our Future ‘iHomes’ probably lie somewhere in between – where developers will construct the exterior of a building, we’ll choose how much space we want based on square footage instead of rooms – rather like slicing up a cake – and then customize the inside to suit our own needs, more than likely using flat-pack ‘room pods’ we’ll buy off-the-shelf at IKEA.

Imposing minimum space standards based on the number of ‘rooms’ in each type of ‘house’ doesn’t create higher quality homes or come close to addressing the complexity of the issues involved in designing modern housing – that requires a different type of thinking altogether. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got – only bigger.

We may not have the answers yet, but – with the housing market on pause and housing developers no longer dominating the conversation – it’s the perfect time to be asking the question:

Where do we want to live?

Did you find this article useful? Do you have any any pet peeves about housing? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to know more about.