It's been lost in the noise of the recession and the mortgage drought, but we may have witnessed the first shot in a quiet housing design revolution in the United Kingdom.
The launch of the London Housing Design Guide, produced by the office of the mayor of London, is the opening salvo in what may be a long war to persuade developers to build homes that are larger and better than those produced in the recent past. If this campaign succeeds in the UK, it may move to other countries, too.
The mayor's contention is that new-build homes are too densely built, and he wants to do something about it.
He says each property is too small and, to make matters worse, in the UK there is a fetish for buyers to have the maximum number of rooms when they purchase a new home. To achieve this in an apartment or a house that already has a small footprint, requires many small rooms – making that 'tiny' feeling more acute.
This trend flies in the face of a voluntary British construction code, first created almost half a century ago, called the Parker Morris Standard. This set out a minimum space per property, based on the number of residents designed to live there.
To be precise, Parker Morris says there should be 355 square feet of internal space for the first occupant of a property with each additional resident getting an extra 140 square feet. So almost 50 years ago, a one-bedroom flat designed for two residents would have had a minimum of 495 square feet.
For well over a decade now, UK developers have ignored this standard and built smaller and smaller homes. When I researched this recently, some developers were constructing properties as much as 20 per cent below the Parker Morris standards.
Now the London Housing Design Guide aims to change all that.
It calls for more space between and around individual buildings and a mix of housing sizes and types close to each other. There are going to be better designed entrances and shared areas, car parking and cycle and waste storage, but most critically there are guidelines for larger internal spaces and bigger rooms.
The guide calls for each home to have 10 per cent more space than the 1961 Parker Morris Standard, as well as better sound-proofing and better ventilation that makes the homes more suitable for the warmer summers and wetter winters that climate change are bringing to the UK.
The mayor, the flamboyant Boris Johnson, has aimed the guide at public sector low-cost homes – over which his office has some element of control through funding and planning consent – but he explicitly wants private builders to follow the guide too.
"For too long we've built homes to indecently poor standards, fit neither for Bilbo Baggins nor his hobbit friends, and that's indefensible. The finest city in the world deserves the finest housing for its inhabitants and when we get it wrong it can scar generation after generation," says Johnson, making his media-friendly references to the Lord of the Rings to try to encourage press interest in what may otherwise be considered the dull subject of housing design.
So what might all this mean for the rest of the world?
Well, cities with a similar age and density to London have seen similar trends of small buildings, so what applies to the UK capital applies to Manhattan, Paris, Rome and many other large, old conurbations. Mayor Johnson has been speaking with other city leaders around the globe to see what their experiences have been.
What is different in the UK is that the trend towards small homes has happened not just in London but also in the suburbs and even rural areas – in other words, in areas where there is no real need to build small homes.
For that reason the average floor space of a new home in the UK (and this includes houses as well as flats) is just 818 square feet; Denmark is the largest on 1,475 square feet and Greece comes second with 1,361 square feet. In France, it is more than 1,200 square feet. But even in these countries, the big old cities have ever-smaller flats.
The recession has caused a lot of damage to residential markets everywhere, and much of it has not been the fault of developers. But one area where the developers could improve their own act is on home-size – and the new design guide gives them the chance to do it.
- The author is a property correspondent of the Observer