Does Britain have the smallest houses in the Western World?

[LostInBrussels]

Wow! that Japanese flat is tiny. Having said that, a rent of less than 350 gbp per month, wouldnt even get you a single room in London.

[The Lone Gunman]

Just wondering.

Yes, way back in the dim and distant builders started buiding smaller and smaller houses to fit more in (as was stated above). The Govt of the day (I think Tories) decided this was a bad thing and so dictated a minimum standard. They literaly measured a double bed and the width of a dressing table, added 18" around the bed and said that is how small a room can be to be called a double bedroom. So now every builder makes all double bedrooms that size. A luxury house just has more rooms.
The rest of europe used some sort of ground space calculation in the pricing policy, thus there is a balance between size and cost.

[Moscow Mule]

Wow! that Japanese flat is tiny. Having said that, a rent of less than 350 gbp per month, wouldnt even get you a single room in London.

Depends on your definition of London - you can easily get a double room for that money in most parts of zone 2. Not sure about zone 1 as I've never really been interested.

[Moscow Mule]

The rest of europe used some sort of ground space calculation in the pricing policy, thus there is a balance between size and cost.

You wouldn't believe the trouble we had explaining the concept of "2 double bedroom flat" to estate agents in Budapest (c2001). They just wanted to know how big a flat we wanted...

[conned tractor]

The Govt of the day (I think Tories) decided this was a bad thing and so dictated a minimum standard. They literaly measured a double bed and the width of a dressing table, added 18" around the bed and said that is how small a room can be to be called a double bedroom. So now every builder makes all double bedrooms that size.

Sounds spookily paralell to minimum wage.

Not that minimum wage affetcs anyone here...yet.

[tim123]

The UK builds the smallest homes in Europe, according to the government's adviser on architecture. ...British new-builds are less than half the size of those in the United States and Australia. Boomed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8201900.stm

This refers to room size, not property size.

It's because we value houses based upon the uttely stupid idea of number of rooms and not by square footage as is done in most other countries.

In Germany, I once saw a 50 sqm rental apartment that was one room (plus bathroom). In the UK a property this size would have been configured as four separate rooms (plus bath) to make it worth(!) more. In Germany, a 50 sqm apartment would be worth exactly the same regardless of the number of rooms it had, but the one room configuration costs less to build.

I thought the German idea had taken things too far the other way, hated it and moved on, but it is not uncommon to find apartments configured like this.

tim