SWEATING THE DETAIL 1: micro-tricks to help make smaller homes work well

In “Size matters”, we outlined how average stand-alone house sizes have varied over time, mostly got a lot bigger, and currently have carbon footprints many times an acceptable level under the Paris Agreement.  

While reducing building size is not the only key strategy in decarbonising our construction sector, it is a very powerful one that can also bring a range of other benefits, including reducing cost.

Here we explore a few micro-tricks for helping make smaller buildings work well. This isn’t a “design guide”, nor does it go into the obvious “just make rooms smaller” strategy, but it looks at sometimes-overlooked features that might offer space savings (or cause space penalties).

Core message: strive to be honest about what is driving design decisions, and double check that decisions still align with the real design intent.

Trying to impress people: Be realistic about just how many features are driven by designers trying to impress clients, or clients trying to impress visitors. We’re all vulnerable to this, and my involvement in many thousands of designs and estimates has made it clear this influences stuff a lot more than we might like to think. I’m not suggesting we shrink everything to an absolute minimum or cut out all the wow features, but just be realistic how big a part the quest to impress might play in the design process.

The “what we’re used to” trap: The shifting baseline (see “Size matters” ) has affected lots of details too, and we soon get conditioned to “new normals”.

I grew up with a 760 x 760 shower, 900 x 900 became the norm for much of my design career, and many people now snub anything under 1000 x 1000. Sure, size is nice, but that 1 m shower we now think is the minimum may make a bathroom 100 mm bigger in one or both directions, which equals incremental size and cost and carbon creep, and possible lost space from another room.

Doorways are a bit the same. An 810 door is now commonplace, but not so long ago 760 was standard (often with 710 into service rooms). The swing of an 810 door into a toilet may force the room to be 100 mm longer to give enough clearance to close the door when you’re inside, or to make it wider if the door swing clashes with a wash hand basin. This applies to other rooms too, such as the need for a bedroom to be big enough for the door swing to clear a bed.

The same could be said of stud heights. The more we get used to 2.7 m high, the more likely we are to find a 2.4 m ceiling feels low, yet for eons 2.4 m was the norm and likely nobody gave it a thought. Of course, we can argue the drift towards bigger lounges etc. makes 2.4 m more likely to feel low – so should we then be discussing “bigger lounges” too?!

Check out circulation efficiency: I’ve seen a lot of plans in my work, and I sometimes wonder if the designer has done any sort of check on just how much of the home is being built for circulation.

Below I’ve grabbed a standard plan off the web, marked it up to show the most basic circulation (i.e. purely needed to get to other places - somewhere you can’t put furniture or fittings, and excluding task areas like in front of kitchen, laundry or vanity benches), and then blocked out an area equivalent to the circulation.

Over 25% of the habitable area of the house – equal to all the living area and well over half the dining -  is being built just for getting to other places.  

Basic Floor Plan

Floor plan with circulation

Floor plan with circulation equivalent

This plan isn’t even a particularly bad example, but as well as all the extra circulation being built, check out how the dining room is compromised - even more so if we factor in ranchslider access. And note the walk in wardrobe bottom left: if, instead, the ensuite wall extended across the corridor the wardrobe could be 50% bigger and there’d be a saving of about 0.5 m of wall.

However, let’s give credit where it’s due. “Alcoves” – AKA dedicated spaces with no through circulation – are great use of space, and the lounge and kitchen are both good examples, giving optimum functionality for their respective areas.

If you like these micro-tricks, check out Sweating the Detail 2 for more.