6 ms·

> For a personal example, my wife complains that an 1800 sqft house is too small. A modern blueprint 1800sqft house, yeah, for sure. But somehow a 1960s split

> For a personal example, my wife complains that an 1800 sqft house is too small. A modern blueprint 1800sqft house, yeah, for sure. But somehow a 1960s split level at 1800sqft is spacious. We are throwing square footage away on multiple large bathrooms, 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms, and then wonder why the rooms we actually occupy are so small. The recent trend towards 4 story narrow houses doesn't help. A literal 1/3rd of the house is taken up by stairs! I'm in a 2300sqft house that has 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms and an office. There is still a bit of wasted space, but not much! Meanwhile, I've seen new houses, 3000sqft, 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 1.5 million. "Oh you want 4 bedrooms? Those start at 1.7 million" <-- Said by an actual house developer

bumby 5y ago
>But somehow a 1960s split level at 1800sqft is spacious. I've actually found the opposite. Modern builds seems to prefer open floor plans and higher ceilings that older homes do not. To me at least, this can make the equivalent square footage seem less cramped. To your point though, it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space. Newer homes also seem to be kitchen heavy, and have larger closets (and also bedrooms), all of which reduces shared (and, but for the bedroom part, total) living space with the same square footage.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes, although the dining area is often part of a largely open common area that includes the kitchen and living room. My brother recently rebuilt a house in Maine and largely went with an open floor plan with relatively modestly-sized bedrooms and bathrooms. It makes pretty efficient use of space. The downside is that if someone want to have their own space, they pretty much have to go outside or retreat to their bedroom. My house is fairly standard 200 year old New England Cape (though some of it isn't original). I've largely opened up the downstairs to be a common space that I use heavily. Upstairs are four fairly small bedrooms and one small bathroom. It's fine for myself and guests. But even with just two people, there's really only one spare room which I tend to use for staging trips and various hobby stuff I don't want to clutter my office. I'd add that for a lot of people, one small bathroom would be a deal-breaker although shared bathrooms were considered the norm a few decades ago.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    Big kitchens with islands and casual dining space add so much value to a home today. People absolutely love making the kitchen a centerpiece room. It can be used for so many things. I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes. And that the living room was the center of it all.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      >I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes. And in some cases, it was where the servants dealt with such things out of site of any guests. The house I grew up in had such an arrangement. And although we didn't have a cook, etc., in the sixties, my parents did a lot of large dinner party entertainment. While my mother did the cooking, it would still have been pretty much unthinkable for guests to be hanging out in the kitchen much less helping to clean up etc.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      My ideal/dream/lottery home would be laid out as though I had a decent sized staff, utilitarian rooms out of sight, clear division between things. I won't turn down the staff if you're offering, but note that's not what I'm saying - I'd just like each room to be efficient/appropriate for how I'm spending my time when I'm there. A functional kitchen that's easy to clean but can be left in a mess while I send the food up in the dumbwaiter, and myself through the baize, to a more 'form over function' dining room. (Functional as a dining room of course.. I just mean that's decorated for comfort etc. rather than being a work area.)
- brimble 5y ago
  Having more rooms and more division between them is part of why older houses feel bigger to me. Modern ones also do some really stupid stuff with square footage. One house we owned had a massive master suite the size of the entire 2-car garage (it was over it) plus some more carved out for the bathroom, but without any dividing walls or doors (even the [large] bathroom was just an open, wide doorway entry, no closing doors). It was huge, but also not quite big enough to divide into multiple spaces with furniture and rugs or whatever without it looking and feeling weird. A kind of awkward fake-luxury size. And it was a front-back split with a living room in the lower part alongside the entryway, with a fireplace and big window... the layout of which made it almost impossible to set up actual living room furniture in a decent way, so we basically didn't use that entire room and used the basement instead. The house could have been a solid 500 sqft smaller and felt just as large, with some tweaks to the design. Nearly every other house we've owned, aside from one very old one (by American standards-1910s construction), had similar issues with large areas being wasted for one reason or another, due to how they were designed. I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. Harder to furnish, and arrange furnishing properly, too (not enough wall space, more backs of things visible) [EDIT] I'd actually liken the open-floorpan trend to the haphazard McMansion appearance of the outside of houses. One thing I've noticed looking at lots of houses over the years is that nice, big, older houses, or newer ones built with balanced and regular exterior layouts, tend to look smaller on the outside than they actually are—or, put differently, McMansion-style houses look much bigger than they actually are. They're loud, and deceptive. Open floor plans are like that for interior space.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. I don't know. I live in an old house that I've incrementally opened up the first floor of. And I find the largely opened up space much airier and lighter and a generally better use of space than the more closed spaces were. That said, I do mostly live by myself so I don't really run into the issue of not being able to get away from other people unless I retreat to my office or small bedroom.
- chaxor 5y ago
  Yeah those higher ceilings are very popular, andextremely inefficient. We recently saw this in the new constructed homes in Texas, which made their problem with the power grid last year even worse. The few minutes they gave power to those fancy new home regions (during the time they were cycling power steering) basically went to waste, because the ceilings were so insanely high, and everyone has the open and spacious aesthetic. Many of them had 2 story entrance like ceilings, and few doors to close off where the heat should be directed. Older homes in the north tend towards lower ceilings and smaller rooms with doors - so heating one room can be efficient and fast
  - bumby 5y ago
    Sure, I was going to mention the tradeoff with the inefficiency but left it out for brevity. I will say, though, that the same inefficiency in those geographic areas exist when building multistoried buildings. A ranch is much easier to cool in west texas/new mexico/arizona than a multistory building where the bedrooms and living areas need to be cooled. I've notice the construction style also mitigates this somewhat. In the west where slab-on-grade is the norm, ducts run through the attic, meaning diffusers are in the ceiling. This makes natural convection of cold air more efficient, especially when coupled with something cheap like a ceiling fan. But at the end of the day, you're right that there's still substantially more air to condition. I don't know if I'd say that was even a proximate cause of the texas power grid situation though which was largely due to weatherization issues. Can you elaborate?
    - giantg2 5y ago
      There are a lot of articles that go through the issues in detail. The main points they list are that in that climate heating is less of a concern and so inefficient resistant heating is common. Then the grid itself didn't winterize, which lead to some plants not staying up and the others not being able to cover the spike in demand with a reduction in generation capacity.
      - bumby 5y ago
        That's kinda what I'm getting at. The root cause of the failure was not winterizing the plants and infrastructure, not really about residential construction design. The resistance heating failed due to the grid design, not the other way around. Having more electrical demand would have not been much of an issue, I presume, had the grid been more resilient. Conversely, less resistance heating would not have magically made the grid more resilient.
- com2kid 5y ago
  1960s split levels, knock down a single wall and you have an open floor plan. It is an incredibly common remodel. They often have vaulted ceilings and front bay windows. While I do <3 a well done modern floor plan, sadly most new houses have garbage floor plans. Ironically, and IMHO, the smaller houses tend to make better use of space out of pure necessity. Take a 1200sqft 2 bedroom house, tell builders they have another 1000sqft, and they'll shove in a 2nd dining room, 3 closets, another bathroom, but no more useful space. Related, 2 bedroom 3 bath houses make me want to scream.
giantg2 5y ago
"A modern blueprint 1800sqft house, yeah, for sure." This seems to mostly be a difference in preference. The house is 1.5 baths and not large ones. Some layout parts are less efficient, like a master bedroom bigger than it has to be (so opposite of the numerous small rooms issue you brought up). But overall there is plenty of room, even a room dedicated as a play room. But overall this is a great example of shifting preferences over time since an average size house was 1970 was about 200 sqft less that this, and I grew up in an 1100sqft house. Prices vary by location. You can have a 4 bed house build for a quarter of that in many areas of the country.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> We are throwing square footage away on multiple large bathrooms, 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms Two living rooms (well, “living” and “family”) and two (“formal” and, well, not) dining rooms are pretty common in 1960s homes at the size being discussed. Bedrooms, bedroom closets, and kitchens are probably smaller than newer homes, though. > The recent trend towards 4 story narrow houses doesn't help. Tall, narrow houses have been a feature of urban single-family homes for a while, I don't think they are a new trend.
- asielen 5y ago
  Modern homes have less room to live and more room to store crap.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I haven't really noticed that. Some older home don't have closets, or only small ones. But then it was common to have a shifero etc, taking up space too. Areas commonly used for storage, like unfinished attics, basements, and garages aren't generally counted in the assessed sqft.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    3 car garages so full of stuff they can't fit a single car! Modern America in a nutshell. The number of "parlors" I've seen full of boxes is unreal.
- com2kid 5y ago
  > Two living rooms (well, “living” and “family”) and two (“formal” and, well, not) dining rooms are pretty common in 1960s homes at the size being discussed. When house buying in 2020/2021 I looked at over 100 homes. Very few, if any, of the 1960s houses wasted space on two dining rooms, and a fair number had basements converted to family rooms but it obviously wasn't an original part of the floor plan. The 1960s split level design is obscenely efficient in space usage. There are plenty of variations on it, but the well done ones, vaulted ceilings, visible interior wood trusses, are still nice to live in today. The only modern amenities they are missing are a walk in closet and a full master bath. Clocking in at ~2000sqft they can do more than a modern 3000+ sqft home does. > Tall, narrow houses have been a feature of urban single-family homes for a while, I don't think they are a new trend. Agreed, but the new breed is much narrower than before. I've been in Chicago row houses, and sure they are narrow, but the new ones they are building around Seattle are insane. It is basically one room then a flight of stairs. 3 bedrooms, one in basement, one on 2nd floor, 3rd on top floor. It borders on unlivable for a family, not to mention anyone over the age of 35. Honestly it'd be much better if they just made regular condos, instead of 4 across narrow homes of 4 stories, do 4 flats.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"The recent trend towards 4 story narrow houses doesn't help. A literal 1/3rd of the house is taken up by stairs" If you want vertical efficiency, we have apartments for that. You get a single staircase and 20 single-story homes instead of 20 staircases in 20 homes. Its funny that US/UK/ anglosphere seems to have never figured out apartments, in Uk you can't even be a true owner - first you pay leasehold, then you pay ground rent, then you pay service charge (for which they are not obligated to provide any service), so you paid 3 times for the same thing! And then when yoy find out that your block was built in breach of fire regulations, it's not the material supplier, not the developer and not the building landlord that get the bill, its the leaseholder that does not even own the house that has to pay for 'waking watch' (pateolls by firemen) and any repairs! People who bought Shared Ownership apartments (you own 25%, other 75% is owned by investors) are responsible for 100% of the cost of fixing the building because between developer, supplier, fire inspector and landlord someone has commited fraud. UK likes to think fo itself as free country, but I have never seen laws as tyranical and feudal as housing laws here. It's like they were writted for medieval lords to opress their peasanta and never changed. If you want to know more about this, google 'cladding scandal, UK'
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The US has large apartment buildings, the problem is that there is not a whole lot of anything between 5-20 stories, and there is a construction premium for 20+ story buildings. (And in the US it would be two staircases and 20 single story homes, specifically because building codes require two staircases to prevent a Grenfell-like disaster.
  - yholio 5y ago
    In all honesty, Grenfell was caused by bad construction choices, materials and political penny-pinching. A second stairway filled with cyanide smoke would have had very limited benefits.
- neilwilson 5y ago
  Nobody really wants to live in an apartment. People really want to live in their own little hut - as we have done for centuries. "in Uk you can't even be a true owner " You can never be the 'true owner' of any land in England. All land is technically owned by the Crown. You can only ever hold an interest in land in England - a freehold being the best you can get, and even those are littered with covenants these days.

bumby 5y ago

>But somehow a 1960s split level at 1800sqft is spacious. I've actually found the opposite. Modern builds seems to prefer open floor plans and higher ceilings that older homes do not. To me at least, this can make the equivalent square footage seem less cramped. To your point though, it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space. Newer homes also seem to be kitchen heavy, and have larger closets (and also bedrooms), all of which reduces shared (and, but for the bedroom part, total) living space with the same square footage.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes, although the dining area is often part of a largely open common area that includes the kitchen and living room. My brother recently rebuilt a house in Maine and largely went with an open floor plan with relatively modestly-sized bedrooms and bathrooms. It makes pretty efficient use of space. The downside is that if someone want to have their own space, they pretty much have to go outside or retreat to their bedroom. My house is fairly standard 200 year old New England Cape (though some of it isn't original). I've largely opened up the downstairs to be a common space that I use heavily. Upstairs are four fairly small bedrooms and one small bathroom. It's fine for myself and guests. But even with just two people, there's really only one spare room which I tend to use for staging trips and various hobby stuff I don't want to clutter my office. I'd add that for a lot of people, one small bathroom would be a deal-breaker although shared bathrooms were considered the norm a few decades ago.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Big kitchens with islands and casual dining space add so much value to a home today. People absolutely love making the kitchen a centerpiece room. It can be used for so many things. I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes. And that the living room was the center of it all.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes. And in some cases, it was where the servants dealt with such things out of site of any guests. The house I grew up in had such an arrangement. And although we didn't have a cook, etc., in the sixties, my parents did a lot of large dinner party entertainment. While my mother did the cooking, it would still have been pretty much unthinkable for guests to be hanging out in the kitchen much less helping to clean up etc.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    My ideal/dream/lottery home would be laid out as though I had a decent sized staff, utilitarian rooms out of sight, clear division between things. I won't turn down the staff if you're offering, but note that's not what I'm saying - I'd just like each room to be efficient/appropriate for how I'm spending my time when I'm there. A functional kitchen that's easy to clean but can be left in a mess while I send the food up in the dumbwaiter, and myself through the baize, to a more 'form over function' dining room. (Functional as a dining room of course.. I just mean that's decorated for comfort etc. rather than being a work area.)
brimble 5y ago
Having more rooms and more division between them is part of why older houses feel bigger to me. Modern ones also do some really stupid stuff with square footage. One house we owned had a massive master suite the size of the entire 2-car garage (it was over it) plus some more carved out for the bathroom, but without any dividing walls or doors (even the [large] bathroom was just an open, wide doorway entry, no closing doors). It was huge, but also not quite big enough to divide into multiple spaces with furniture and rugs or whatever without it looking and feeling weird. A kind of awkward fake-luxury size. And it was a front-back split with a living room in the lower part alongside the entryway, with a fireplace and big window... the layout of which made it almost impossible to set up actual living room furniture in a decent way, so we basically didn't use that entire room and used the basement instead. The house could have been a solid 500 sqft smaller and felt just as large, with some tweaks to the design. Nearly every other house we've owned, aside from one very old one (by American standards-1910s construction), had similar issues with large areas being wasted for one reason or another, due to how they were designed. I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. Harder to furnish, and arrange furnishing properly, too (not enough wall space, more backs of things visible) [EDIT] I'd actually liken the open-floorpan trend to the haphazard McMansion appearance of the outside of houses. One thing I've noticed looking at lots of houses over the years is that nice, big, older houses, or newer ones built with balanced and regular exterior layouts, tend to look smaller on the outside than they actually are—or, put differently, McMansion-style houses look much bigger than they actually are. They're loud, and deceptive. Open floor plans are like that for interior space.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. I don't know. I live in an old house that I've incrementally opened up the first floor of. And I find the largely opened up space much airier and lighter and a generally better use of space than the more closed spaces were. That said, I do mostly live by myself so I don't really run into the issue of not being able to get away from other people unless I retreat to my office or small bedroom.
chaxor 5y ago
Yeah those higher ceilings are very popular, andextremely inefficient. We recently saw this in the new constructed homes in Texas, which made their problem with the power grid last year even worse. The few minutes they gave power to those fancy new home regions (during the time they were cycling power steering) basically went to waste, because the ceilings were so insanely high, and everyone has the open and spacious aesthetic. Many of them had 2 story entrance like ceilings, and few doors to close off where the heat should be directed. Older homes in the north tend towards lower ceilings and smaller rooms with doors - so heating one room can be efficient and fast
- bumby 5y ago
  Sure, I was going to mention the tradeoff with the inefficiency but left it out for brevity. I will say, though, that the same inefficiency in those geographic areas exist when building multistoried buildings. A ranch is much easier to cool in west texas/new mexico/arizona than a multistory building where the bedrooms and living areas need to be cooled. I've notice the construction style also mitigates this somewhat. In the west where slab-on-grade is the norm, ducts run through the attic, meaning diffusers are in the ceiling. This makes natural convection of cold air more efficient, especially when coupled with something cheap like a ceiling fan. But at the end of the day, you're right that there's still substantially more air to condition. I don't know if I'd say that was even a proximate cause of the texas power grid situation though which was largely due to weatherization issues. Can you elaborate?
  - giantg2 5y ago
    There are a lot of articles that go through the issues in detail. The main points they list are that in that climate heating is less of a concern and so inefficient resistant heating is common. Then the grid itself didn't winterize, which lead to some plants not staying up and the others not being able to cover the spike in demand with a reduction in generation capacity.
    - bumby 5y ago
      That's kinda what I'm getting at. The root cause of the failure was not winterizing the plants and infrastructure, not really about residential construction design. The resistance heating failed due to the grid design, not the other way around. Having more electrical demand would have not been much of an issue, I presume, had the grid been more resilient. Conversely, less resistance heating would not have magically made the grid more resilient.
com2kid 5y ago
1960s split levels, knock down a single wall and you have an open floor plan. It is an incredibly common remodel. They often have vaulted ceilings and front bay windows. While I do <3 a well done modern floor plan, sadly most new houses have garbage floor plans. Ironically, and IMHO, the smaller houses tend to make better use of space out of pure necessity. Take a 1200sqft 2 bedroom house, tell builders they have another 1000sqft, and they'll shove in a 2nd dining room, 3 closets, another bathroom, but no more useful space. Related, 2 bedroom 3 bath houses make me want to scream.

giantg2 5y ago

"A modern blueprint 1800sqft house, yeah, for sure." This seems to mostly be a difference in preference. The house is 1.5 baths and not large ones. Some layout parts are less efficient, like a master bedroom bigger than it has to be (so opposite of the numerous small rooms issue you brought up). But overall there is plenty of room, even a room dedicated as a play room. But overall this is a great example of shifting preferences over time since an average size house was 1970 was about 200 sqft less that this, and I grew up in an 1100sqft house. Prices vary by location. You can have a 4 bed house build for a quarter of that in many areas of the country.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> We are throwing square footage away on multiple large bathrooms, 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms Two living rooms (well, “living” and “family”) and two (“formal” and, well, not) dining rooms are pretty common in 1960s homes at the size being discussed. Bedrooms, bedroom closets, and kitchens are probably smaller than newer homes, though. > The recent trend towards 4 story narrow houses doesn't help. Tall, narrow houses have been a feature of urban single-family homes for a while, I don't think they are a new trend.

asielen 5y ago
Modern homes have less room to live and more room to store crap.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I haven't really noticed that. Some older home don't have closets, or only small ones. But then it was common to have a shifero etc, taking up space too. Areas commonly used for storage, like unfinished attics, basements, and garages aren't generally counted in the assessed sqft.
- com2kid 5y ago
  3 car garages so full of stuff they can't fit a single car! Modern America in a nutshell. The number of "parlors" I've seen full of boxes is unreal.
com2kid 5y ago
> Two living rooms (well, “living” and “family”) and two (“formal” and, well, not) dining rooms are pretty common in 1960s homes at the size being discussed. When house buying in 2020/2021 I looked at over 100 homes. Very few, if any, of the 1960s houses wasted space on two dining rooms, and a fair number had basements converted to family rooms but it obviously wasn't an original part of the floor plan. The 1960s split level design is obscenely efficient in space usage. There are plenty of variations on it, but the well done ones, vaulted ceilings, visible interior wood trusses, are still nice to live in today. The only modern amenities they are missing are a walk in closet and a full master bath. Clocking in at ~2000sqft they can do more than a modern 3000+ sqft home does. > Tall, narrow houses have been a feature of urban single-family homes for a while, I don't think they are a new trend. Agreed, but the new breed is much narrower than before. I've been in Chicago row houses, and sure they are narrow, but the new ones they are building around Seattle are insane. It is basically one room then a flight of stairs. 3 bedrooms, one in basement, one on 2nd floor, 3rd on top floor. It borders on unlivable for a family, not to mention anyone over the age of 35. Honestly it'd be much better if they just made regular condos, instead of 4 across narrow homes of 4 stories, do 4 flats.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"The recent trend towards 4 story narrow houses doesn't help. A literal 1/3rd of the house is taken up by stairs" If you want vertical efficiency, we have apartments for that. You get a single staircase and 20 single-story homes instead of 20 staircases in 20 homes. Its funny that US/UK/ anglosphere seems to have never figured out apartments, in Uk you can't even be a true owner - first you pay leasehold, then you pay ground rent, then you pay service charge (for which they are not obligated to provide any service), so you paid 3 times for the same thing! And then when yoy find out that your block was built in breach of fire regulations, it's not the material supplier, not the developer and not the building landlord that get the bill, its the leaseholder that does not even own the house that has to pay for 'waking watch' (pateolls by firemen) and any repairs! People who bought Shared Ownership apartments (you own 25%, other 75% is owned by investors) are responsible for 100% of the cost of fixing the building because between developer, supplier, fire inspector and landlord someone has commited fraud. UK likes to think fo itself as free country, but I have never seen laws as tyranical and feudal as housing laws here. It's like they were writted for medieval lords to opress their peasanta and never changed. If you want to know more about this, google 'cladding scandal, UK'

bobthepanda 5y ago
The US has large apartment buildings, the problem is that there is not a whole lot of anything between 5-20 stories, and there is a construction premium for 20+ story buildings. (And in the US it would be two staircases and 20 single story homes, specifically because building codes require two staircases to prevent a Grenfell-like disaster.
- yholio 5y ago
  In all honesty, Grenfell was caused by bad construction choices, materials and political penny-pinching. A second stairway filled with cyanide smoke would have had very limited benefits.
neilwilson 5y ago
Nobody really wants to live in an apartment. People really want to live in their own little hut - as we have done for centuries. "in Uk you can't even be a true owner " You can never be the 'true owner' of any land in England. All land is technically owned by the Crown. You can only ever hold an interest in land in England - a freehold being the best you can get, and even those are littered with covenants these days.