Houses with a lot of 'wasted' space? Are they annoying to live in?

[reeeee]

We are looking at buying a new place. It's a maisonnette. Weird layout over three floors. On paper it appears a good size for a two bedroom flat.

It's 90 sqm. But when you add up all the corridors and stair cases et cetera, you end up with 65sqm. It's crazy that almost 1/3 of the place is wasted space?!

Does living somewhere like that grate on you?

And I posted this in holidays instead of property ....

Too busy reading about Greek islands...

Please could a mod move to the right forum? Sorry!

Our house is a bit like that! I love it. Lots of funny mezzanine floors.

My dd once fell down the stairs as a toddler but we have no flights of stairs longer than 5 steps (because of all the funny mezzanines) so she was completely fine, not even a bruise.

Our wfh office room is on its own halfway up mezzanine, which feels more private.

That is why I cant stand it when people argue that listing houses by their square meterage is better and more accurate than saying its a 2 bed or something

Some houses have a lot of nooks and crannies that you cant necessarily do anything about

Is it priced reasonably for a property with only 65sqm of room space?

Because I'd feel very differently if the corridor space was 'free' as opposed to the property being priced against a property with 90sqm of usable room space.

I wonder if this would bother me. It's made me review my home, and i think it's very good on this issue, one upstairs hall and one downstairs hall, which are required, there's no wasted space.

A friend had a property like that and had bespoke bookcases built along every staircase and corridor so it became loads of useful storage, would that work? Was great for her massive book collection.

@mnhq

An architect once explained that he tended to use open plan for smaller houses to avoid the wasted space

Any walls to knock down?

Funnily enough, we've just stayed in a very badly converted/extended holiday home. Corridors and landings everywhere alongside different levels. Really annoying! So much wasted space that you're constantly walking past/through.

Then the rooms themselves were huge and looked pretty stupid as they were (typically holiday cottage) pretty bare, such as a gigantic loft conversion for the master bedroom with a standard 4'6" bed at one end and a tiny single wardrobe at the other end! A huge family bathroom with a tiny shower cubicle in a corner! The main living area was a square extension that had a tiny/basic kitchen in one corner and just a bog standard sofa and TV Stand stuck in the middle with a tiny circular dining table/chairs in another corner. Despite lots of space, they didn't even have a full height fridge/freezer - just small/basic low level fridges and freezer separate under the worktop, and the washing machine/drier were in an outhouse!

It was really strange to have gone to the time and expense of extending/converting a building so badly (the owners had done it as they had a folder of pictures proudly showing all the stages of conversion from the sorry state it was in when they bought it to the converted state).

The actual floor space would probably have allowed for it to be four bedroom, but the way it had been extended/converted with all the corridors and landings meant there were only two bedrooms, but by God, they were huge. They could even have made them both ensuite (the water supply and drainage would have been possible) but instead had a huge single family bathroom between them. No downstairs loo despite there being lots of space for one.

The thing was that they'd done a lovely job on the "soft" stuff like curtains, bedding, fabrics, cushions, sofas, etc., straight out of a glossy magazine, but completely screwed up the practicalities of the layout.

I think that ours could be described in that way. Not just the corridor space (of which there is a lot when I compare it to my parents’ similar size house). But also the rooms are a bit strangely balanced - the bathroom and en suite are both very large but the bedrooms are small.

It doesn’t bother me “in itself”. It does bother me that ds’s room is so small.

We bought the house as a child free couple and now we have a teen and a tween so we didn’t think through how our “housing needs” would change.

Depends on if those areas are included in the total sq ft of the sale floor plan.

This was my thinking.

As long as the passageways weren't just narrow corridors then I would look at doing something just like this.
Would make use of otherwise unusable spaces, allow storage without encroaching on living areas and provide interest to otherwise "boring" passageways.

Hello @reeeee - we're just shoving this over to Property now.

I'd look at whether any of the wasted space could be useful space, as pps have said. I used to live in a flat with a u-shaped corridor hallway as it had to go round the communal entrance way in a double-fronted building and it was really, really annoying as, other than a mirror on one wall, there was no room to do anything else with it! Fortunately the rest of the flat was a good size so it was worth the trade off.

Another thing I have seen, if the landings are decent size, is to use them as office spaces.

Depends on whether those spaces are useful, I.e wide enough. We have sideboards in hallways all over the place. One is a laundry table, cupboard with just mops, holding wood, holding junk, toiletries and lightbulbs. What does annoy me are the vast rooms in the house. I would far prefer more rooms with more wall space that you can put stuff against than a 15x20 bedroom that still looks half empty, even with an office corner in it.

Could you share a floorplan?