Just to conceptualize this, it's like every 5 bedroom house having 1 unused bedroom, perhaps being used as an office. Of course, most houses don't have 5 bedrooms, so in reality this is an extra bedroom for every 2 houses. Again, possibly being well used for another purpose. That doesn't seem like a lot of underutilization to me.
Are you purposefully being obtuse? The point is the difference between bedrooms, bedrooms used as offices, etc, and spare bedrooms. You can have more bedrooms than people and fully utilize the rooms not being used as bedrooms; the statistic is 20% of rooms are being underutilized ie spare bedrooms that don’t get used.
And what are people doing in detached homes that they cannot be doing in dense multifamily housing?
Space itself is a luxury (it has a knock on effect of increasing the distance everything within and around that space has to travel).
I might define multiple unused houses as not being a waste just like someone with multiple unused bedrooms defines it as not being waste. A “spare” house and an “spare” bedroom. And vice versa.
I think you’ll probably also find that the “spare” bedroom in many houses ends up getting used for other things—storage, a hobby room, (famously) perhaps an office or second office.
My spare bedroom has a futon couch but I actually use the space for various other things most of the time. Most people may have space that’s underutilized much of the time but that doesn’t mean it’s sealed off until they have an overnight guest or a large dinner part. Things aren’t that binary.
What would you use all of the extra rooms for? One room for each person to sleep, a laundry room, a couple bathrooms, and a great room with living, dining, and kitchen is all you ever really need right?
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.
We live in an 1140sqft house, just 2 of us. With just 1 (small) bathroom it is less than ideal, particularly when we have guests, but it works -- just. It is basically a box of a house with 3 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a place to eat. There is no "extra" space aside from the rooms -- no wide hallways, no sitting areas, no extra horizontal surfaces to put junk.
Of course, we have more space than we "need" -- 2 additional bedrooms. But, again, they're just large enough for what they do. 1 has a guest bed (and not any room for anything else, really) and the other is an "office" which is handy during covid-19 for sure.
If we had kids, there would be room for them to sleep, but no playroom, for example. Our laundry is in the garage, as is our "workout room". That space is not counted in the official size of the house, because the garage is converted.
My home is listed as having more bedrooms than people.
They are not dead spaces, and they wouldn't somehow become more useful if I knocked a wall or two through to reduce the room count or reclassified them.
I absolutely know people with rooms that are literally unused. They aren’t empty, but it’s not a valuable use of space just because it means you don’t have to get rid of your last three couches and a desk that’s nice but not nice enough to use.
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.)
a house i am looking at has a bathroom for every bedroom. it makes no sense and i am contemplating removing 1.5 of them for more storage if i buy the house (it's not looking likely).
I'm not deliberately being obtuse - I simply don't believe that many people have literally empty rooms that they don't use.
I don't know anyone that has an empty room in their house, or one that no-one enters for weeks at a time, etc. Maybe the odd country estate is like that.
To a communist, the concept of having a guest room, office, storage room etc might feel like "underutilization".
If we apply that more generally, then the park outside my house is underutilized because the maximum capacity are not sunbathing in it at all times. I think that's a pretty silly use of language.
I'm not saying it's reasonable, but I think these people are designing their house for peak capacity, not average. people with these kinds of houses might fly their entire extended family out for holidays (or several of their friend's families). they don't necessarily care that the place is empty most of the year; it's probably not their only house anyway.
TBH it looks like a remodeled attic room. And the way it's all crammed in a corner suggests that it isn't taking up an especially large amount of space. We don't see how large the rest of the room is.
I live in a pretty average US home (built in 1971, raised ranch similar to this:https://photos.zillowstatic.com/p_e/ISi3u8fp8ljszu1000000000...) and there's plenty of room in the 2 non-master bedrooms to dedicate half the room to a crammed-in arrangement like this, with a bed crammed in the other half.
A lot of the open concept houses around here use enough space for four rooms for one big one. Usually kitchen + dining area + a single living room easily large enough to be two. If you're lucky you have one other room in the public area, designated by design as a dining room (distinct from the merely-yards-away dining area!), and if you're super lucky it's at least got three walls rather than just being designated by flooring and maybe like one pillar.
More rooms is nice if you don't like being on top of every single other person in the house all the time, without having to go to your bedroom (aren't we supposed to only go there for sleep, for sleep-hygiene reasons?) to escape. In recent houses this means using ~3x the space you actually need to accomplish that, mostly by adding a room or two in a finished basement, because the main public area's gigantic, yes, but also entirely open.
It's also very nice to be able to contain messes. So nice. One large shared living space plus kids means no part of your house ever doesn't look like shit without heroic efforts or paid help.
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