> I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates.
In Europe (at least in the UK) it's common for houses/apartments to be shared by many flatmates regardless of the number of bathrooms. 4 seems to be roughly the upper limit on 1 bathroom. 5 bedroom places almost always have 2. And many houses with only 1 bathroom will have a second small toilet-only room.
> I have a 4-bedroom, 3 bath house, and we use them all.
This tends to be more or less valid for any resource in the house (extra room, closet, etc.). And as it stands bathrooms are on the important side. If you had one bathroom per resident they'd still all be used simply because the people would thoroughly enjoy not having their stuff moved around or bothered by anyone else, or ever risk having to wait for someone to get out first. So you'd just have "assigned" bathrooms.
You could even have an extra one that can come in handy when you are remodeling or simply experiencing technical issues in one of the others.
> Even if you have 4 people in your family, do they all need separate rooms
“Need” is a flexible term; it's clearly possible for people to survive without any rooms. But, yes, there's plenty of reason to believe that there are benefits to having a private space.
But most likely a four-person family with a 4-bedroom house has two adults sharing the master bedroom, two children with their own rooms, and a guest room and/or office.
> and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time?
Hopefully, close to zero, since your hypothetical still has fewer bathrooms than people. But multiple restrooms.
But, it's actually quite likely that multiple people will be using bathrooms for either elimination or bathing at the same time, particularly in the mornings.
(It's also somewhat likely when entertaining, which is one of the reasons people want large houses.)
Most people with a family of four or a 3 bedroom place would have 2 baths (or often 1 proper bath and one toilet without shower/bath) in Europe too. What I find a bit strange is the "4 bedroom / 4 bathroom" thing. Bathroom 3/4 seems a bit over the top.
I imagine it's because 1-2 of those would be ensuite to one or more of the bigger bedrooms and/or that one or more aren't full baths.
> it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space.
Newer homes also seem to be kitchen heavy, and have larger closets (and also bedrooms), all of which reduces shared (and, but for the bedroom part, total) living space with the same square footage.
The point is, that they usually plan one bathroom per floor, not per bedroom. The primary reasons for that are prices and available space. At the moment it is quite hard to buy land on which you can build a large house in Germany. It is not only expensive, but there is often almost nothing available.
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.
I don’t think this requires that much analysis. As the article acknowledges, American houses are on average double the size of ones in the EU. That leaves plenty of space to place bathrooms to maximize convenience (as opposed to just handling maximum expected occupancy). For example, our 1950s house growing up had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one upstairs shared by the bedrooms, and one downstairs for the family room. My parents’ current house has one more bedroom, but two more bathrooms. Two of the bedrooms get a private attached bath, and the other two share a Jack and Jill bathroom. The main level gets a powder room. If we finish the basement, that’ll be another bathroom, because people don’t want to have to go to another floor to access the bathroom.
I can't say I've done a full study on this, but at least anecdotally, the claim of this article seems over-blown. I'm a software engineer for a large tech company (i.e., I make pretty good money), and I live in a relatively well off part of the US (New Jersey, in the New York suburbs). When I was looking for a house, most houses in our price range had either 1 full bathroom or 1 full bathroom and 1 half bathroom. So even in a pretty well-off situation, it's not automatically the case that you live in a huge house with lots of bath rooms.
To the extent that the claim that American houses have so many bathrooms is true, I'm not sure you can think about American real estate in such a homogenized fashion to assume it is universally true. I think it applies in certain particular circumstances, but is not universal.
I live in a 1 bathroom apartment with my wife. Even with no kids, it's still tough. The marginal benefit of adding 1 more bathroom is enormous, kind of like a dual core vs single core processor.
As a guy who lives in a 7x5m studio somewhere in Eastern Europ, in a building like this one http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3152/3082829290_9653703b1e_b.j..., I try and try again to find out why would you need three bathrooms and five bedrooms, but I really cannot think of any reasons.
I come from a country where most people build homes on their own. One norm that we always practice is that bathrooms are either equal in number, or more than the number of bedrooms in the house. This is because we are always an extended family, and extended family visits us. Most bedrooms have an attached bathroom + 1 (common bathroom for guests/maids/)
In America, I found that it is exact opposite. Bathrooms are less in number compared to bedrooms. My son and daughter are fighting for bathroom time as we live in a 4 Bed 2 bath house. Adding to our agony was when my parents who recently visited us. Now, one bathroom for 4 people.
I understand the cost implications. But compared to my house in my motherland, American house is 3 times bigger. Why can't the builders reduce size and build more bathrooms.
Agreed completely. I have a 4-bedroom, 3 bath house, and we use them all. We have one attached to our master bedroom, one main bathroom on the main floor, and one in the basement. We spend a lot of time as a family in the basement, we spend a lot of time with guests on the main floor, and my wife likes to use our private bathroom as a little getaway.
I think a decent rule of thumb is one bathroom per floor, plus one. It really sucks having to wait for a bathroom when you need it, and they take up so little space (especially if it doesn't have a bath/shower) that it makes no sense to skimp. We've used all the bathrooms simultaneously, so it's hard for me to consider having fewer.
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.
One per floor, plus one, makes a lot of sense to me.
I don’t think having multiple “full bathrooms” is so important, but “half bath” ie. a toilet and sink takes up very little space, and it’s the kind of thing that, when you need it, you NEED it. So it’s worth it.
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
Yes, I understand that the dynamics might be different for a family. In Spain normally you'd have 1 bathroom for each 1-2 rooms, so a house/appt with 3 rooms would normally have 2 bathrooms.
I am talking mainly as a single person renting. And of course it's my opinion coming from a different culture.
"While bathing, why should we see toilet" I prefer to see an ample room while doing anything, than to have a wall right in front of me. It's not about the contents of the room, but about having walls less than 1 feet on each side of my face (for the toilet). "Toilet smell" should not be a problem normally with decent ventilation, specially with the industrial fans that Japanese homes seem to have in the bathrooms.
My issue is with overall distribution, where Japanese houses (at least for single person/room) seem to take 30~40% of the floorplan space in what in other countries would be a single room taking 15~20%.
In Europe (at least in the UK) it's common for houses/apartments to be shared by many flatmates regardless of the number of bathrooms. 4 seems to be roughly the upper limit on 1 bathroom. 5 bedroom places almost always have 2. And many houses with only 1 bathroom will have a second small toilet-only room.
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