What is fixed
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.
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.
Three of the four fixed constraints in this record were settled by people who have never been in the flat while anybody worked in it.
The orientation was settled by whoever sited the building. The plan was settled by an architect. The doors were settled by a developer choosing between hollow and solid at perhaps thirty pounds a door across a block.
None of those decisions was about employment, and all of them now determine how two jobs fit into sixty-eight square metres. Before treating a quiet week as proof that the arrangement works, managers can review the vendor information directly and define which delayed workload patterns would trigger a closer review.
The door decision
Worth dwelling on because it is the cheapest and the most consequential. Another useful point of comparison comes from CBRE.
A hollow internal door and a solid one differ, at the point of construction, by a modest sum per door. The hollow one is lighter, easier to hang, and adequate for the use everybody anticipated: a bedroom door, shut at night, in a building where nobody is working.
It is inadequate for a scheduled call, and nobody involved in choosing it had any reason to consider a scheduled call.
A decision about thirty pounds a door, made before anybody lived there, is responsible for about half the friction in this record.
The orientation decision
Three rooms face one way because that is how the block sits on the plot, which was determined by the road, the boundary and the planning consent.
The consequence is that between November and February this household has two usable rooms before ten in the morning rather than five, which pushes the first work session into the kitchen, which is the 7–9 am window.
Nothing about that was a mistake. A flat with three rooms facing one way is an ordinary flat.
What has changed
Not the buildings. The use.
A dwelling built in the ordinary way for the ordinary assumption — one or two people, out during the day, home in the evening — is being asked to accommodate two full working days inside it, and the features that make it a good dwelling under the old assumption are neutral or unhelpful under the new one.
Hollow doors are fine when nobody is on a call. An open-plan living-kitchen is excellent when the household is doing one thing together and is the worst possible arrangement when two people are doing different things at eleven on a Tuesday.
Two conclusions this does not reach
Nothing here says dwellings ought to be built otherwise. One flat cannot carry a claim about how housing in general should be made.
Nor is any of it a grievance against a particular landlord. The flat is in ordinary condition and the tenancy is ordinary.
And it is not an argument that the household is badly off. Sixty-eight square metres, five rooms, every room off a hall, a quiet room at the end of it: this is a reasonably well-arranged dwelling and it absorbed two jobs for a fortnight with forty-seven collisions and eighty-eight gains, which is a good result.
What it is
An observation about where the difficulty sits.
A household that finds working at home difficult will look for the cause in its own arrangements — who uses which room, whether people are considerate, whether somebody needs a better desk. This record suggests that a substantial share of the difficulty was settled by strangers before anybody arrived, is not reachable by anything the household does, and is invisible because nobody ever sees a decision about door cores.
Knowing that does not fix anything. On the household's own account, it changed what they argued about, which is the most this kind of record offers.
The decision that was about money and the one that was not
The door core was a cost decision: hollow doors are cheaper and across a block the saving is real.
The orientation was not a cost decision at all. A building sits on a plot according to the plot, the road and the consent, and no amount of money moves it. Whoever designed this block had no choice about which way three of these rooms face.
That distinction matters for what anybody can reasonably expect to change. A specification can be revised — future buildings can have solid internal doors, and some do. A site cannot.
So of the two external decisions shaping this record, one is a policy question and the other is geometry.
What the household would want written down
Asked what they would tell somebody letting a flat to two people who work in it, the answer was not about doors.
Say which rooms are quiet.
A letting particular describes rooms by size and name. It does not say which room is acoustically isolated from the kitchen, which is the single most useful fact about a dwelling for this purpose and is knowable by anybody who has stood in it.
That is a small, free, entirely voluntary change to how a property is described, nobody has any reason to make it, and it would have told this household on the day they viewed the flat what took them six months to work out.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do