I lived in a two-up, two-down in Windsor, and my wife (when I met her) had one in Bexley.
They're nice houses. The main issue is that most now have to have an extension on the back to house an indoor bathroom. In my house, it was ground floor after the kitchen. In my wife's it was upstairs above a kitchen extension, but you could only get to it after going through the main bedroom. Handy as an en-suite, awkward if you had friends to stay.
Same in Toronto. Saw many 1+den with 2 bathrooms. A way to sell the den as a second bedroom and you end up with 2 shitty small bathroom with no storage. Not a fan of this layout.
Well when the term was coined, the key was two full width rooms each floor. Get out into the industrial and poorer areas especially in the North, Scotland and Wales and there were some one up, one down back to back terraces. Most of those went in slum clearances, but some survive...
Sure, the indoor bathroom/toilet was added later as it was a Victorian era innovation, but the second room on the ground floor was generally a back kitchen/diner. So you'll find a great many with a later kitchen extension (frequently flat roofed, and incredibly poorly, or not insulated) that permit separating kitchen and dining room, often adding an upstairs indoor bathroom/toilet for the first time. When those extra rooms were there from new build they weren't called 2+2s -- though they were clearly two bed houses derived from them.
UK estate agent standard for describing housing is number of bedrooms. Apparently we're meant to figure everything else from "two bed", "five bed". What else is in there is often quite varied and ludicrously (fraudulently) creative in estate agent blurb. Thank heavens for the relatively recent expectation of a floorplan and regulation limiting estate agent creativity. Until the 1980s or 1990s you almost never got a floorplan unless buying new, or exceptionally upmarket. :)
I think we've over-corrected on that front. Indeed, one place in which I lived (a modern build) had (on paper) five bedrooms and four bathrooms (three en suite). But there were four of us, so two of those 'bedrooms' weren't used as such; leaving too many bathrooms. Mad really, I agree. Downstairs WC in addition to those.
(And it's not like there were a plethora of reception rooms to go with them - surely a family that was going to actually use five bedrooms as five bedrooms would want space to spread out a bit, even if a couple of them had to share a bathroom as a result?!)
(Before that a three-bedroom Victorian build - one nice large bathroom and a small WC+shower room, I suspect the latter was a later division. Neither en suite. Point is it is (was?) a modern fetish, and I think (hope?) it's waning slightly.)
One of the thing that struck me about British houses and apartments is that they tend to have en-suites "no-matter-what". I don't think I've ever seen a single house or apartment with an en-suite before I moved to England (also: carpets in the bathroom, wtf?! And the weird thing with two taps.)
I find it rather curious waste of space, especially in ~50/60m2 apartments. Why do you need more than toilet and shower? I suppose that parallelized pooping and/or showering can be useful in rare occasions, but usually doing it serially works well enough and overall seems like an exceedingly poor trade-off. But the Brits seem to love 'em shrug.
Crossing borders can also be fun; with some crossings you can see an immediate and marked difference in building style; the Dutch/Belgian border is like that for example.
New Zealand houses are just horrible, full stop. Don't know how they managed to get so far behind on the rest of the Western world with that.
Not sure what I'm trying to say with this comment; don't really have a specific point as such. I just find it interesting that different countries have such different approaches to building and arranging houses, even though they're relatively similar in culture, climate, etc.
I was in a 2 bedroom house with 1 bathroom and three people, including me, until I was 18.
I don't remember it being too bad, probably because only two people in the house had to leave in the mornings, and we left at different times. Also because I didn't know anybody who had more than one bathroom. Our extended neighborhood was all 1940s construction.
It varies. Newer homes tend to have a lower ratio of bedrooms to bathrooms. Split level homes with the bedrooms upstairs tend to have at least a half bathroom downstairs. And of course, if you have a home custom built or remodeled you can get whatever you're willing to pay for.
I've lived in a 1 bathroom house in the US and i said never again. It was one of the first things I looked at when buying a house overseas as well, and it served me well.
Problems with a single bathroom which includes the toilet:
If you have kids, everyone is fighting over a scarce resource in the morning. Showering/shaving/etc all takes time and you're all leaving in a narrow window.
If you don't have kids the people buying the house may, and they will care. It makes selling the house so much harder.
The bathroom _must_ be cleaned to be guest ready, and they get to accidentally snoop through everything. I love my ensuite for this reason. (and if you don't care about it being clean, your partner probably does)
If you have the room, why not have an extra bathroom? So much easier to build in new construction than add later.
When I lived in Australia the toilet was in a separate room, so the 4 bedroom house worked ok with only 2 bathrooms. The toilet wasn't blocked/held hostage by someone taking a shower. (washing your hands on the other hand...) But this also helped sell the place, since with 2 full bathrooms you can have kids/house mates/etc.
My current house has 3 baths with 4 bedrooms. One is in the in-law suite, which I airbnb, so we have 2 on the main floor. It makes 2 baths for 3 bedrooms. This feels like a nice "adult" house. We have a spare rooms for house guests, and they have a full bathroom they can use. This means we can host friends/family for days/weeks and we can be annoyed by their personality, instead of annoyed fighting over a bathroom. ;)
Of all the weird things in the US, a house having "too many" bathrooms really doesn't seem like a problem.
Yes, I expect the trend would still be there, just not quite as dramatic.
We live in a 3-bedroom 2.5-bath home and I wouldn't want to give any of the bathrooms up. Not having two full bathrooms would be seriously annoying when either my or my wife's parents are in town, which is about 6 weeks a year, and not having the half bath on the ground floor would be mildly annoying all the time (and slightly more annoying when friends are over).
For most of human history indoor plumbing has also been a luxury.
Though you're right that a 1-br + living space should be "decent" for 2 people (the 2-br probably has a living +kitchen too, so is probably not bad in living arangements). Studios are usually a pretty tight fit (euphemism) for 2 people I'd think though.
I actually dislike ensuite bathrooms for myself. Like that there is separation for sleeping and showering/bathrooms. The moisture from the bathroom comes to the bedroom. On guest rooms it's can be nice that the guests don't have go around the house when they want to use the bahtroom.
Optimally, I'd say a house should have one toilet on each floor, and at least two toilets and bathrooms.
Some of it is age. I only have one bathroom in about an 1800 sq ft house. Presumably the indoor plumbing was added at some point. But, while a house that size would have 2 brs today, there’s just no easy way to add one and I don’t need it.
This was the one thing we insisted on when my wife and I were looking for a house. We have four bedrooms upstairs, but we also have a guest suite with a full bathroom downstairs.
The idea of a separate formal and informal dining room was wasteful. We turned one into an office.
I don't disagree with the 'vast majority' not having them, but I don't think it's S unusual as you imply either. Probably the vast majority don't have an en suite bathroom either (I don't mean to imply a complete intersection, these are two 'vast majority' circles in a Venn diagram), but the new builds have multiple.
Coal cellars in particular are/were especially common.
I used to own a three bedroom suburban townhouse that had 3½ baths. Each bedroom had a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. It definitely made the properties (this was a 10 unit condominium) attractive for people who wanted roommates
I grew up in a 1 bathroom house until I was 14 or so. 1 bathroom for a family of 4 was rough. If anything ever broke (which it did because the house was old), and it's a full on emergency. Having to drive 15 minutes to use bathroom and take a shower at a family members was a common occurrence.
My current house has 3 full bathrooms which is really too many for just my wife and I. But, the extra bathroom has come in handy as we have remodeled over time.
In some places like NY, it may be due to building regulations. It's harder to get a bathroom installed in a floor as opposed to an extra bedroom. You can only have bathrooms in a certain # of floors
They're nice houses. The main issue is that most now have to have an extension on the back to house an indoor bathroom. In my house, it was ground floor after the kitchen. In my wife's it was upstairs above a kitchen extension, but you could only get to it after going through the main bedroom. Handy as an en-suite, awkward if you had friends to stay.
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