ARCHITECTURE MINI-TUTORIALS: "But how much can you *do* with a 70 square-metre house?!"

 THIS IS ONE OF THOSE rare things, a government announcement I can get behind:

“Last year the Government consulted on allowing\granny flats of up to 60 square metres to be built without building or resource consents. The proposal received huge support, and as a result the Government has agreed to go even further by increasing the maximum size to 70 square metres.” 

This is great news!

And it does look like it may actually happen — with the announcement yesterday that " Granny flats of up to 70sqm, and papakāinga of up to 10 homes would be allowed without a consent on specific land zones."

Never mind the misnomer "granny flat," When/if this is introduced, any house with a decent sized-section will now give owners the opportunity to add one new minor dwelling. (Let's call it that, shall we, rather than the more popular but slightly derisive 'granny flat'.)  One minor dwelling in all the places that's possible can do amazing things for making dwellings more affordable — helping make up for three decades of cementing in the opposite trend.

"But," I hear you ask, "how much can you do with a 70 square-metre house?!" Answer: a lot. If you do it right, a minor dwelling might even become your major dwelling.

To give you some idea of that size, until recently, the average size of a New Zealand house was 200 square metres. Now that we've been overdosing on bland, cooky-cutter townhouses, it's just under 160 squares. 

So even with that drop, a house of just 70 squares represents a fairly drastic compression of space.

So ... how much can you do with a 70 square-metre house?

Turns out, with a knowledge of good spatial design and a little bit of cunning, an awful lot.

Yes, I know those of you living in homes with kitchens the size of a large double garage won't fit in. But, for the record, I live in a very workable house of just 45 square metres. So to me, 70 square metres looks like a luxurious surplus of useable space!

So let's have a look at what a little bit of ingenuity and exploiting a few legal loopholes can do.

Architect James Schildroth recently designed this artful 2-bedroom 756 square-foot house below (around 70.2 square metres) and will make it available to build. In the States (where the sun is a different way around and building is much cheaper), he reckons it would cost around US$270,000....

Despite the size, it has almost all a home needs. There are several space-saving measures here (smaller bedrooms and closets, minimal kitchen, etc.) and a number of 'tricks' that help space appear larger—most especially carefullly "nesting" spaces, and opening spaces up at the corners. That low roof corner outside the lounge is especially effective, offering privacy from a possible neighbour, while also suggesting to occupants that the edge of the main space is defined by the outside edge of those overhanging eaves, at once both sheltering and opening up.

These psychological "tricks" are important in every home, but especially important in one so small, when every square metre has to justify itself many times over — space that's not just flexible, but hard-working!

Floor plan & diagram overlay for Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighy House (above) suggests how 'nesting' 

spaces within even a small home can help produce an illusion of larger space by virtue of the shared 

spaces — the particular space experienced depending on the observer's location at any point in time

HERE'S ANOTHER: A 72 SQUARE-METRE home-office by (Organon Architecture) over two levels, the lower of which is just 55 square metres, but with extensive pergolas — and a hill!

And you can do a whole lot with even less, if you're cunning enough.

The key, really is breaking the box. Understanding how to play with the visual field to suggest a larger apparent space.  And to properly 'nest' spaces so that every square metre within works harder, and suggests more.

Prefabricated modules and the like are part of the thing, but not the main thing. It's how modules and spaces are arranged that becomes the main thing.

HERE ARE SEVERAL MORE EXAMPLES. 

Several years ago, when it looked like Auckland Council were about to relax rules around 60-square-metre "minor dwellings," I was commissioned to produce a few floor plans and systems for what, it was anticpated, could have become a modest business. Sadly, the relaxing of rules never happened, and my client instead decided to try for better things in Queensland. But the idea is there in each of these homes: that a modestly-sized home need not feel small if it is well laid out.  

The aim was to build these homes on a precast-prestressed concrete transportable deck — using a container module in order to show the many limitations of container design, and to allow factory-built homes to be fully transported if possible. They featured both "ceiling decks," to help with services and the manipulation of space,  and a "smart slab" in which dimensions were set for the builder and in which all main services were to be run as a "plug-and-play" system.

I did modify one of these designs to be built in a small town in Victoria. (See if you can work out which design...?)

Anyway, take a look. There were around a dozen ...

Like I say, you can do lot with sixty metres. Let alone what you can do with seventy!

Tropical architecture in Darwin

I'm posting these pics here partly because they help to understand the context of Glenn Murcutt's 'shearing shed' house that Den posted recently. These here are photos of one of Darwin's few remaining original, pre-air-conditioning tropical houses, restored after Cyclone Tracy. I took them about ten years ago. As you'll see, many of the features are replicated in Murcutt's own tropical house.

They do represent a quite significant achievement: the culmination of British colonial knowledge of how to build in a soakingly hot and humid, termite-ridden, climate. And there is something special about such a simple yet intelligently-designed building in such an extreme setting.

I'll quote from the photo of the signboard (above):

Designing for the tropics

Stretching west down Myilly Point [in east-central Darwin] is a group of four tropical houses designed in 1937 by B.C.G. Burnett, principal Government Architect for the Northern Territory. His previous experience in China and Malaya enabled him to understand the local climate. He designed elevated houses with steep-pitched roofs and open eaves to catch the refreshing sea breezes. Further innovations included replacing the external walls with asbestos-cement [ie., fibrolite] louvres that could be adjusted according to the weather conditions. The living areas and bedrooms were separated by three-quarter height partitions to allow for cross-ventilation. Burnett's practical and aesthetic designs established a regional architectural style that continues to influence contemporary housing designs.

Burnett's tropical designs are very well known in tropical architecture circles, and were widely emulated, as Murcutt would know and just as he would expect the readers of his own architecure to know. So, I would imagine -- and here I'm speculating-- that Murcutt was intentionally "reinterpreting the colonial response" to the Australian climate in a new "multicultural context." Or something like that. And he would expect his "readers" to be able to "interpret" what he'd "reinterpreted."All very "postmodern" in that respect, then.

But I'm posting the photographs for another reason too: simply because this was a bloody nice house to be in, even at the hottest part of the day. "Colonialist," "imperialist" or whatever you want to call him, Mr Burnett had done a very nice job of very intelligently and very simply designing a house for a bloody uncomfortable place in which to live. On this evidence I'd just call him a very fine craftsman, and a pretty intelligent architect.