The hall is a quarter of the floor

Why this is not waste

The obvious reaction is that ten square metres is a room, and a room would help. It would: bedroom two is nine square metres and absorbs an entire job. Where flexible work changes both schedules and space, decision-makers can read about the available controls before setting the baseline, access rules, and review date.

But a hall is not floor that happens to be empty. It is the thing that makes the other rooms separately usable. Without it, the kitchen opens onto the living room, the living room onto the bedroom, and every one of the forty-seven collisions in this record becomes worse, because the people involved could not have gone anywhere without passing through whatever they were trying to leave. This observation can be read alongside workplace and design research from Office Snapshots.

Circulation is not the absence of a use. It is the use that makes the others independent of each other.

That is worth stating plainly because the arithmetic of a small dwelling constantly tempts you to the opposite conclusion. Ten square metres looks like an opportunity. It is a structure.

What it actually costs

The real figure is not ten square metres. It is what the ten square metres remove from the rest.

Sixty-eight minus ten is fifty-eight, and fifty-eight is the number the rest of this site is really about: the floor available to the nineteen uses. The hall does not compete with them; it reduces the pool they draw from before any of them starts.

Fifty-four square metres carrying nineteen uses works out at under three square metres a use, which is a number worth holding next to any statement about whether a home can absorb somebody's employment.

The one thing it does carry

Deliveries. Nineteen of the eighty-eight episodes in this record are parcels taken, and they are taken in the hall, and that is the only logged use of the space.

This is the quiet exception to everything above: a use did arrive in the hall, it arrived because of the paid work, and it fits because it needs floor and nothing else. A parcel does not need warmth, a surface, a chair or quiet. It needs somewhere to be put down that is not in the way.

That is the complete list of activities with those requirements, which is why the hall has one use and not four.

Why it cannot be given another

Several were tried during the fortnight and all were abandoned. The log records three.

Exercise. Moved to the landing on day nine, abandoned on day eleven. The floor is adequate; the problem is that the landing is the route between the bathroom and everything else, so somebody is always walking through.

A second desk. Proposed, not attempted. There is no wall long enough that does not contain a door.

Drying laundry. Attempted twice and persisted with, which is why it does not appear in the use count: the log requires an activity on more than two of the fourteen days and this managed exactly two.

The pattern is the same each time. The hall fails not for lack of floor but because every one of its square metres is within reach of a door, and an activity that cannot tolerate being walked past cannot live there.

What this means for the arithmetic

A dwelling's usable area is smaller than its floor area by an amount that is not recorded anywhere and is not proportional to anything. This flat loses twenty per cent of its floor to circulation and washing before the question of work even arises.

Two dwellings with identical floor areas can therefore differ substantially in how much employment they can absorb, and the difference is in the plan rather than in the square metres. That is a property of the building, it was fixed before anybody moved in, and no rearrangement reaches it.

The hall is doing a second job that is not counted

There is one function the hall performs continuously and that the use count cannot capture, because it is not an activity.

It makes the other four rooms independently reachable.

Every room in this flat opens off the hall. Nobody has to walk through an occupied room to get to another one, which means that a person leaving a collision can leave it without creating a second one.

That is worth putting beside the seven chains recorded elsewhere in this site. Seven times, a displaced activity was displaced again in the room it had gone to. Not once was anybody displaced on the way — which, in a flat with rooms opening off each other, is exactly what would have happened.

A dwelling of the same floor area with a through-room arrangement would produce a different and worse record, and the difference would be entirely attributable to ten square metres that appear in this log as a room doing almost nothing.

What the household says about it

Asked whether they would trade the hall for a sixth room, both people said no without much hesitation, and both gave the same reason: the bathroom.

In a flat where the bathroom opens off the hall, getting to it costs nothing. In a flat where it opens off a bedroom or a living room, it costs somebody an interruption every time, all day, for two people working at home.

That is not in the log, because no activity gives way when somebody walks to the bathroom. It is the clearest example in the record of the hall's value being invisible to the method, and of a household knowing something about its dwelling that the measurement cannot reach.