3 ms·

I think in the US a home office and a guest room is also usually needed, so 4-5 bedrooms makes total sense. In fact 4-5 bedroom single family houses in the US

by qurren 4mo ago

I think in the US a home office and a guest room is also usually needed, so 4-5 bedrooms makes total sense. In fact 4-5 bedroom single family houses in the US are extremely common. What I don't understand is why apartments always seem to stop at 2b or 3b.

sokoloff 4mo ago
Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building. The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
toast0 4mo ago
Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either. Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too. It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
pandaman 4mo ago
The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car. Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well. [+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.

by qurren 4mo ago

sokoloff 4mo ago

Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building. The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.

toast0 4mo ago

Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either. Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too. It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.

pandaman 4mo ago

The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car. Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well. [+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.