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0 pointsarp2424y ago0 comments

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.

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OJFord4y ago

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.)