When you start building your home, the question of “what rooms you need” often appears at the beginning. Some people can determine their needs easily. Nevertheless, some people sometimes find it difficult to estimate the space needed for their home. This is more crucial when you are going to build/occupy a house in a crowded city. Then, what do you think about when you want to build a house in a big city? The following questions can help you determine a must-have space in a simple urban house.
1. How many family members?
When first designing the space you need for your home, the first consideration is usually related to the number of your family members. The need for space for families with three, four, five family members is very likely to be different.
If the family is a new family consisting only of husbands and wives, perhaps the need for space will be minimal. One master bedroom with toilet and shower, as well as small pantry (kitchen) and living room can be enough. Families of three or more family members may require additional rooms.
2. How old are each family member?
The age of each family member can be taken into consideration when determining the space needed in your dwelling. Family members who are still babies for example, do not require a separate room space. A baby or young child will usually sleep in the same room as a parent’s room. This will certainly make it easier for parents to keep their babies or small children whenever they need something at night.
While adult family members ideally need a separate bedroom. However, this individual sleeping space is not necessarily the tangible way that is in the minds of people in general: the 3 × 3 meter wide room is bounded by walls. Things related to this dimension will be discussed further in point 8.
3. How much time do you spend at home?
How much time do you spend at home? This question is almost similar to the question: what are your daily activities, and how the pattern? By knowing the pattern of your daily activities, you can understand the proportion of your use of space for a full day, every day.
As an illustration, a new family of husbands and wives who both work outside the home may only spend nine hours each day at home (on weekdays), and a little longer on weekends (when not outdoors ). While families of three or four family members, whose parents work as entrepreneurs (eg, selling at online stores), then everyday may be more often at home. Thus, the second family may need more space and comfort.
4. Is there anyone else who will stay in your house?
The next question you can use to estimate the space requirements in your home is whether there are others who will stay in your home (in the long / short span)? Other people can be your parents, family / relatives, or housekeeper / nanny, and so on.
If the answer to that question is “yes”, then you need to think about the space requirements. Of course this should be adjusted also with the answer to the third question above. Thus, for example for housekeeper that only works during the day, may not require a separate bedroom. However, if the living is your parents or relatives, of course ideally they need a separate space.
5. Do you prefer an enclosed space or a “flowing” space?
The choice of an enclosed space or an open space will certainly be closely related to the occupant’s preference for privacy-level options v.s ease of circulation and broad impression. For those of you who do not feel uncomfortable if your activities in the kitchen / pantry seen by guests for example, could be the choice of open plan selected (note: although you choose a more open / flowing space, does not mean you can not get around the privacy aspect. get privacy by eg placing partitions from non-rigid materials, eg from fabrics, beads, etc.).
If privacy is what really matters to you, spaces can be an option. However, you need to remember that by sealing the space in full / rigid, the impression of the space will be significantly reduced. Of course this also needs to be taken into account especially for urban homes that have a limited area.
6. What is your land area (specifically for the tread house)?
Especially for an urban home in the form of a tread house, limited land area needs to be addressed wisely. The need for space for an urban home in the form of a tread house needs to be taken into account well. This is so that the optimal space generated, considering the home footprint will be affected by some regulation points such as the maximum extent of the building footprint to the land (KDB), the minimum green open space (KDH), and the height of the building (KLB).
In general, KDB residential buildings are 60% of the land area. Thus, if the area of your land is 100 m², the floor area of your house should not exceed 60 m². In addition, the placement of building footprint (building footprint) will also affect the arrangement of space in. If the land is already surrounded by surrounding buildings, the Building Border Line (GSB) may affect the placement of wall openings. This means that the internal spaces that require good air circulation should be placed on the side that is directly adjacent to the outside air (to avoid the appearance of the “space in space” configuration).
7. What is the relevant regulation in your area about the minimum room to be there?
Before deciding what space is needed and will be built, you should see the relevant regulation in your area. For example, the local building regulation in DKI Jakarta requires minimal space for a building that functions as a dwelling, which is private space, shared space, and service space. In the meantime, the supporting space for fulfilling the needs of homeowners may be added when deemed necessary (optional). What about the regulations in your area?
8. Space consists of four dimensions, thereby optimizing the utilization of these four “dimensional spaces”.
We are used to seeing space as something physically intangible. When asked about the bedroom, for example: “what kind of bedroom are you?”, We usually spontaneously answer: “my sleeping room is spacious enough, measuring 3 × 3 meters with one bathroom inside”. This understanding is not a misconception. However, in order to optimize space, we need to see space as an integral of four dimensions: length, width, height, and time.
Every space in the house has the elements of length, width, and height (3 dimensional elements) that we generally know. This dimension defines how big the room is. The space itself is essentially a “container,” so the basic thing that needs to be in our mindset when we want to determine space requirements is that space is “a container for activity”.
As containers that have length, width, and height, space can be optimized by exploiting its length, width, or height. In everyday practice, we usually tend to get stuck on optimizing the length and width, and forget about the high optimization of space. This is where one of the important secrets to design an efficient space.
The high optimization of space, along with the length and width of space, increases our understanding of space as a three dimensional creature that has volume. However, do not forget, space also has the fourth element, that is time.
As a container of an activity, space has a time element in it. Have you ever thought, when you come home from your office that is wide enough, what happens to your office space? Empty, is not it? The same thing happens with the room in your minimalist home. When all the inhabitants go off during the day, the room in your house will be empty. By understanding the activity patterns of all residents in their daily time span, then you will be able to maximize the use of space in your home, even if your house is a small house only.
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