LeDeuxions · notes from twenty years on site · 한국어
When people go looking for a home, a big living room is near the top of the list. Open plan, wide span, generous. Then they move in. How many hours a day do you actually spend in that room? Not passing through it — in it.
Architects used to work to a viewing-distance rule: seating distance is some multiple of the screen size. Run it for a family television and you land on a room dimension — 3.4 metres of clear depth, minimum, and more for a larger set.
That number is where the instinct comes from. A room narrower than that felt wrong, and it was wrong, because of what the room was for.
Note the assumption sitting underneath it. The whole household watches one screen together. Everyone on the sofa after dinner, same programme, same room. Under that assumption the formula is correct and the big living room is the right answer.
Look at an evening now. One person is in their room with a tablet. Another is on a phone. The television gets switched on at the weekend, maybe. The shared-screen household the formula was built for does not exist in most homes any more.
The room stayed. The reason for it left.
So what you have is floor area that gets crossed rather than used. A sofa, a table, and several square metres that exist to be walked over and vacuumed. Dead space is not neutral — it costs you in the purchase price and then again every week in maintenance.
Take some of it back and spend it on rooms that earn their keep. In the same total floor area:
A pantry or utility store. Somewhere to put the vacuum, the seasonal clothes, the boxes. A modest living room with a store next to it reads as far tidier than a large one with everything on display.
One more room. Study, workshop, hobby room, home office. Demand for this went vertical after 2020 and never came back down. A small room with a door is worth more than four metres of empty carpet.
A dressing room. Clothes in one place instead of wardrobes pushed against every bedroom wall.
Builders know this. Large living rooms keep getting built because they keep selling — the plan photographs well and it matches what buyers say they want.
Next time you are standing in an empty living room on a viewing, stay put for half a minute and ask one question: what will I do in this room, and for how many hours a day?
Then look at the far three metres — the part beyond the sofa — and work out how many minutes a day that specific piece of floor is for.
Then compare it against a plan of the same size with a store, a study, and a smaller living room. For most households the answer stops being close.
"A good home has a big living room" was the right rule for the era that produced it. The current rule is different: a good home is one where the rooms get used. Dead area only generates cleaning. A store or a spare room does something for you every single day.
In construction there is almost never an absolute. But when the way people live changes, the definition of a good house changes with it — and the formula that produced your living room was solved for a television.
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Written from jobs I worked on, not from a manual.
Small tools I built for everyday work — pdf300.com
And a few things to play with — ledeuxions.com/games