The Buffet Car.
I’ve been redesigning a small terrace house recently. Trying to make it more usable. It’s typical for this type of house. Narrow. The front door, the lounge, the long corridor front to back. The stairs. All of it narrow.
They’re like trains, but you have to live in them. And the bathroom’s usually in the last carriage. A visit to the bathroom at night is like finding the buffet car.
The standard answer is knock out all the walls. Make the lounge, dining room and corridor one space. And it sort of feels like the right thing to do. It feels more spacious. But you’ve still got a corridor, and there’s still nowhere to put coats, shoes, prams, bikes, scooters and bins. Plus you end up with the street the thickness of a door from where you live. No buffer between public and private, cold and warm. Not to mention pretty much ruling out a loft conversion due to fire regulations.
So I started putting the area of each room into a spreadsheet. Trying to understand where the space was actually going.
The headlines? More space is given over to bedrooms than living spaces. The chimneys take up a decent-sized ensuite. The corridors account for about a fifth of the house. And storage is limited to a cupboard under the stairs.
I ran the same model across half a dozen similar houses. The same headlines every time, though the corridor shrinks as the house gets wider. Around 4.8 metres wide seems to be the sweet spot — narrow enough to be a terrace, wide enough to live in without feeling like a commute.
But the thing that really stopped me was this: across the board, the sale value per square metre was less than the cost to rebuild the house to current Building Regulations. Think about that for a moment. The land aside, you couldn’t recreate what you own for what it’s worth on the open market.
Does that matter? Not really — who rebuilds their house? But what it does is reframe the question of value.
Most cars are bought on finance at interest rates double those of a mortgage. The average new car costs around £40,000. The average extension costs roughly double that. One quietly vanishes in value. The other can quietly improve your life.
A new car will depreciate by about 65% in its first five years. The best advice to minimise this is to not use it and keep it nice. Which sounds like madness.
And yet. We’ve quietly accepted that losing money on something parked outside most of the time is just how it works. Spending on the place where we sleep, cook and watch the telly is assumed to be money lost rather than money used. You only have to read the comments on my YouTube videos to see that view expressed, forcefully, often.
The value in your home is in use, not financial return. Just like the car. The difference is we’ve just never been taught to think about it that way.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
Favourite country houses to visit.
This is an interesting conversation about the economy.
The Queen Elizabeth Memorial competition entries. Sometimes doing nothing is the best memorial. Although, as you’d expect from the best living architect in the world, the winning entry is quite compelling when you watch him talk about it.
Main Image credit: Terraced houses: designed for living, but laid out like long-distance rail travel. (ChapGPT)
Thoughts for the Weekend & this Week’s Links
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The Buffet Car.
I’ve been redesigning a small terrace house recently. Trying to make it more usable. It’s typical for this type of house. Narrow. The front door, the lounge, the long corridor front to back. The stairs. All of it narrow.
They’re like trains, but you have to live in them. And the bathroom’s usually in the last carriage. A visit to the bathroom at night is like finding the buffet car.
The standard answer is knock out all the walls. Make the lounge, dining room and corridor one space. And it sort of feels like the right thing to do. It feels more spacious. But you’ve still got a corridor, and there’s still nowhere to put coats, shoes, prams, bikes, scooters and bins. Plus you end up with the street the thickness of a door from where you live. No buffer between public and private, cold and warm. Not to mention pretty much ruling out a loft conversion due to fire regulations.
So I started putting the area of each room into a spreadsheet. Trying to understand where the space was actually going.
The headlines? More space is given over to bedrooms than living spaces. The chimneys take up a decent-sized ensuite. The corridors account for about a fifth of the house. And storage is limited to a cupboard under the stairs.
I ran the same model across half a dozen similar houses. The same headlines every time, though the corridor shrinks as the house gets wider. Around 4.8 metres wide seems to be the sweet spot — narrow enough to be a terrace, wide enough to live in without feeling like a commute.
But the thing that really stopped me was this: across the board, the sale value per square metre was less than the cost to rebuild the house to current Building Regulations. Think about that for a moment. The land aside, you couldn’t recreate what you own for what it’s worth on the open market.
Does that matter? Not really — who rebuilds their house? But what it does is reframe the question of value.
Most cars are bought on finance at interest rates double those of a mortgage. The average new car costs around £40,000. The average extension costs roughly double that. One quietly vanishes in value. The other can quietly improve your life.
A new car will depreciate by about 65% in its first five years. The best advice to minimise this is to not use it and keep it nice. Which sounds like madness.
And yet. We’ve quietly accepted that losing money on something parked outside most of the time is just how it works. Spending on the place where we sleep, cook and watch the telly is assumed to be money lost rather than money used. You only have to read the comments on my YouTube videos to see that view expressed, forcefully, often.
The value in your home is in use, not financial return. Just like the car. The difference is we’ve just never been taught to think about it that way.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
Favourite country houses to visit.
This is an interesting conversation about the economy.
The Queen Elizabeth Memorial competition entries. Sometimes doing nothing is the best memorial. Although, as you’d expect from the best living architect in the world, the winning entry is quite compelling when you watch him talk about it.
Main Image credit: Terraced houses: designed for living, but laid out like long-distance rail travel. (ChapGPT)
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