Homes for today & tomorrow.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
Date:
1961
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Homes for today & tomorrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    61 62 63 Many purchasers of houses want three bedrooms even if their family is only two or three people, whatever the size of the house or the size of the bedrooms; the extra rooms are preferred to fewer larger rooms as giving a more flexible arrangement. For small households these very small houses can therefore be satisfactory, in so far as they comply with our recom- mendations on floor space. For larger households they will not provide the floor space required and they naturally give rise to anxiety for this reason. Because they offer one way of meeting the needs of small! families, we do not suggest that measures should be taken to stop the building of very small houses of this kind; but of course, for reasons of neighbourhood balance, not too many of them should be built in any one place, and the same applies to the bungalows. We believe that the difficulties arising from the small dwelling can be mitigated, but we do not suggest that they can be overcome entirely. We understand that neighbourhood balance and the needs of the area are considerations which can be brought to bear, within the existing powers of planning authorities, upon applications for planning permission. With limitations of numbers on any one site, and with the common sense and relative mobility of the type of household concerned, we do not believe that the remaining problem will be large. Il! Factors in home design A HEATING THE HOME Family life is both communal and individual. There is the process of coming together for activities in which the family joins as a whole— meals, conversation, common pursuits, and so on; and there is the need for privacy to pursue individual activities such as reading, writing, and following particular hobbies. This dual tendency in family life has always been handicapped during the winter months, except amongst the well-off, because of the inability of most people to afford heating in more than one or perhaps two living rooms. At least half the rooms in most dwellings have, therefore, been relegated for sleeping only—a habit which has set the pattern for the rest of the year as well. Yet it is strange that half of what we build, and therefore half of what we pay for, is reserved for use during the hours of darkness when we are unconscious of our surroundings. Better heating is the key to the design of homes at the present time, for it provides an extra degree of freedom in meeting individual needs in the areas of the home which at present are too cold to be suitable for daytime and evening use except in the summer. But there is an increasing demand for higher comfort levels anyway; whether the design of homes takes radically new directions or not, the person moving into a new home increasingly expects to be warm. In factory and office such a standard 1s usually taken for granted, and the expectation is spreading to the home. The evidence on this point was emphatic; better heating took second