What is fixed
What is fixed
Floor area, daylight, heat and sound are properties of a building, not of a schedule. What each one does to the arrangement, and which of them can be bought off.
Hall and landingA quarter of the floor doing one job, and it cannot be given another
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Bedroom twoThe smallest room doing the most concentrated work
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 19 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry four uses. One of the two carry more than one, and bedroom two carries three. The median room is in use 4.75 of the 16 waking hours. The least and most efficiently used rooms, by floor area against hours.
Four things that cannot change
Floor area, sound, daylight and the plan. Every difficulty in this record traces to one of them, and only one can be bought off.
Floor area is the wrong number
Sixty-eight square metres is the figure on the lease. Fifty-four is the figure that matters, and neither predicts how much work a home can absorb.
Sound
Twenty-two of the forty-seven collisions are acoustic. No arrangement of a flat with hollow doors makes a call and a kitchen independent.
Daylight
Three of five rooms face one way. In winter that makes the kitchen the only usable room before ten, which is why the kitchen carries six uses.
Heat is a bill, not a constraint
Heating does not limit what a dwelling can do. It transfers an operating cost from an employer to a household, and it has a price.
The plan is the deepest constraint
Where the walls and doors are determines which rooms can be reached without passing through another, and that determines nearly everything else.
Which of the four can be bought off
One of the four constraints responds to money. It is also the one an occupier is usually not permitted to address.
What a landlord controls unknowingly
Decisions made by people who will never enter the flat determine how two jobs fit into it. None of those decisions was about work.