EG: wasted space. Who needs 4 bathrooms + ensuite? Why would you want a massive kitchen, plus a dining room that's too small to be used for much else than a dining room and only gets used once a week, and then put up with a lounge thats way to long and thin to be any good with a decent-sized stereo?
My ideal = a decent-sized kitchen that you can eat in as well (luxury spec = that plus enough space to include family/day room: a few easy chairs etc); a lounge that you could put your stereo and telly in and have at least 10ft between the speakers; another room that could be used as a music room which in my case implies at least 16ft long and not much less wide.
Compromises: using a bedroom as a lounge if there's not enough rooms on the grouind floor.
Most houses I look at would require knocking through 2 bedrooms to make a decent sized lounge, that's assuming the ground floor plan is any good which in most cases it isn't.
"Working" software has only unobserved bugs. (Parroty Error: Pieces of Nine! Pieces of Nine!)
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
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New houses are built to a price and a minimum government-mandated room size in order to get as many as possible on a given plot.
The house I've just moved out of was built in the 60's and was great, but for the tiny bathroom (about 1600 square, slightly too small for a standard bath).
I'd bet three-quarters of house grumbles could be blamed on the above. They're never *quite* right.
... I'm convinced architects have to have 2/3 of their brain cells removed before they get their licence to practice ...
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
I can remember my sisters sharing a bedroom for years. Can you imagine that happening today? Everyone wants their own bit of space, no matter how small that space actually is.
Similarly, we had one bathroom (and a loo downstairs) for parents + 3 kids. It never seemed to be a major problem. Nowadays, with (some) men spending as much time on "personal hygiene" and "grooming" as an 80's movie star did, everyone wants their own bathroom space, or make-up mirror.
Estate houses are designed and built to hit what "most people" want.
I know it's ridiculous, but the needs of the single male musician, with an interest in hifi, just don't get considered often enough.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
This morning I went to see someone who lives in a council house built in the 50s. Tiny house, massive garden. The thinking was that people would be using those gardens to be growing their own veg because that's what people did in 1950.
They have to guess how people are going to live and they not only get that wrong but often completely useless in terms of future predictions.
When I worked in Telford this was on estates with minimal car parking and poor vehicular access to houses. The assumption in 1970 was that the relatively poor people who lived there were never going to be car owners ( or even recieve deliveries).
It's amazing how wrong some of these things turned out to be.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
"Architects" just don't think, do they?
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
My mum doesn't want a music room, but she does want a room with sufficient space and light for her to paint pictures or fix up clothes. Most people have some kind of hobby to which they need to dedicate space. If all you do is go to work and off out to the pub in the evening then a shoebox may be OK (you were lucky we had to live in hole in t'middle of t'road), but even so most people don't go to the pub any more ... so unless they are going out elsewhere the need (demand?) for a decent amount of space in the house must be going up not down.
Seriously: If you value it, take/fetch it yourself
Houses are designed to attract the biggest number of buyers, my ideal of a ground floor made up entirely of motorcycle storage with a pokey flat upstairs wouldn't attract that many customers.
In architects' defence I will say that over the years I've known a few people who've designed and built their own houses, and they've always had some weirdly unworkable compromise which sounded great to their inner teenager, but was shit in practice.