Tokyo would be right out, then. This YouTuber offers a tour of her 8m[sup]2[/sup] apartment. I don’t remember if she mentions the rent or not.
ed. Ah. It’s in the description. About $680.
I’m confused, then. Most of the built-in closets I’ve seen couldn’t be described as “a tiny room” even if you removed all the shelves and bars.
It is in construction and design a tiny room because the sole fundamental difference between a closet and a room is its size. I’m contrasting it with a wardrobe, which is a large cabinet.
Our house in Germany has a handle on the front door’s inside which is standard - I have never seen a front door, of a house or a flat, where you needed a key just to open it from the inside even if it wasn’t locked. At night however we lock it which, through a number of hooks, seals the door into the filling. Burglars might try to get to the catch with a flat instrument to press it inside the lock so that the door opens, which we’d like to avoid. Also, we pull the key after locking as the door has some glass panels which a burglar could break and then grab inside and turn the key.
Yes, we’re aware that in case of a fire we’d have to suppress our panic and go for the key but where we live, a burglary is much more likely than a fire.
AAAAAAAh. So you’re calling them closets if they’re built-in, but wardrobes if movable? Or is it some other difference?
They’re both armarios for me. One is empotrado (built-in), one is not. IKEA has lots of closets but they’re movable. And Spanish law definitely doesn’t consider built-in closets as rooms; they may not even have the floor at the same level as the rest of the flat/level and the doors are completely different from those of rooms.
My current 1880 Victorian terraced house is similar - downstairs has a hallway and what would have been a separate living, dining room and kitchen. The rooms have all now been knocked together, with folding doors between the living room and dining room, and the dining room forming a kind of kitchen-diner with the (now extended) kitchen.
Still got the hallway though with the staircase to the first floor - I think fire regulations demands it. And it gives me somewhere to keep my shoes, should the desire overwhelm me. lol.
You got it. A closet is a tiny room within a room. It might be big enough to walk into or it might not. Just like a room, it might have no door, a folding door, a sliding door, or a regular swinging-out door.
A wardrobe or armoir is a stand-alone piece of furniture, a freestanding cabinet.
That’s how I’m using the terms.
Another interesting difference.
It’s an important distinction in the United States because storage areas that are part of the construction of the building increase its value. It’s seen as a black mark if you have to buy storage space in the form of furniture.
And, as I said, many municipalities and local governments define a bedroom by law as having a window and a built-in closet.
No, as a legal matter, a closet isn’t a bedroom in the United States because it doesn’t have a window and a closet. And it’s too small to be considered a room in casual speech. I’m just using “room” as the form-defining archetype.
Yes, that’s the distinction.
i think the distinction is a little different than whether it is built-in or not. When **Ascenray **referred to the construction and design being like a tiny room , he wasn’t referring to US law considering a closet a room - it doesn’t. What he was referring to is the fact that what we call a closet is literally a subdivision of the room. It’s not a freestanding wardrobe that you can easily take with you when you move or a piece of furniture attached to the walls and specially made just to fit this room that you could take but probably wouldn’t. I removed a closet from my bedroom in order to install a full wall of Ikea wardrobes - and removing that closet involved demolishing two plaster walls. My daughter’s bedroom closets consisted of a wall built two feet in front of the room’s wall with two doors placed in the front wall - and the doors on both those closets were exactly the same as the bedroom doors.
Interesting, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever heard of ‘bedroom’ having an official designation in the UK. I’ve certainly seen estate agent details which reeeally stretch the definition, applying ‘bedroom’ to any space, you could conceivably squeeze a child’s bed into. Windows be damned.
Indeed, I just googled, and The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says no such definition exists. They seems to be some legislation targeted at landlords around minimum bedroom sizes, but no window or closet requirement.
BTW, it would seem from the descriptions that what you would call a closet, we would typically call a ‘fitted wardrobe’. I doubt it has an effect on house prices.
I don’t think so - from what I can tell a “fitted wardrobe” seems to mean something made to fit into a specific room, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. ( or close to it) We might call that a closet, but “closet” more typically means something like the CL in this floorplan.
To my ears, “fitted wardrobe” sounds like a custom-made cabinet, though, a piece of removable furniture. Is it also understood to encompass the idea of a closet whose walls are part of the construction of the building?
I don’t think it usually is. I have a fitted wardrobe in my bedroom and the shelves are attached to the bedroom wall so it’s more like a door and frame covering an alcove.
In the age before air conditioning, being able to shut off the kitchen from the rest of the house while cooking was a blessing.
Right, and what I was calling a built-in closet is also an integral part of the building. I don’t call it “built-in” if it doesn’t involve masons (the tradesmen, not the dudes in robes). But this is the first time I’ve encountered that specific distinction Acsenray, Bear_Nenno and you are making: as SanVito and Telperion demonstrate, it doesn’t hold for every dialect.
I know a lot of this is difference in language/dialect ( as I would only use “mason” for someone who worked with stone or brick) but look at my description of a closet that consists of one wall built in front of another with doors (that match every other door in the house) in the front wall. Or the floor plan I linked to. Would you call those “built-ins”or is that something that is uncommon in your experience ?
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So would I. Spanish houses are stone or brick; when inside walls are not stone or brick, they’re planks of something which simulates being thin stone of brick (cane covered in mortar for my grandparents’ 1936 flat; prefab nowadays). My 1958 flat in the mountains has load-bearing, 2"-wide walls all around plus one in the middle (one of the hallway’s walls): built by people whose farms had survived centuries of on-and-off wars, it was designed with artillery fire in mind. “Looking for the studs” doesn’t happen: no frames, no studs.
If the doors are like every other door and you can get inside, then it would be considered its own room: a vestidor if it’s used for clothing (vestido = dress; vestir = to dress; vestirse = to dress oneself), a trastero if it’s used for other kinds of stuff (trasto = stuff, item, junk).
The combination of “the doors look like any room’s doors” with “you can’t get inside” practically doesn’t exist. Sometimes I see, usually in entrance halls, a coats closet whose door looks similar-but-not-quite like the regular doors; it is still different enough that anybody who tried to look for a room in it would get a “really? are you feeling ok?” from any onlookers. Unlike regular built-in closets, whose doors are taller than those of rooms or have a second set of doors on top, these tend to be shorter (no upper shelves).
Hmm, you’re making me ask questions of myself that I never thought I’d have to. I guess we’d call it a built-in wardrobe? Closet, as a word, is perfectly understood in the UK, but I feel it’s more an Americanism than wardrobe. A ‘closet’ anywhere other than the bedroom would be a ‘cupboard’. I have several of those built in, under the stairs and on the landing.
We certainly do have ‘built in’ wardrobes/closets in some homes in the UK, but it varies hugely from home to home - our housing stock varies greatly in style and age. My Victorian home has no such thing originally, but I’ve had fitted wardrobes built bespoke to make the most of alcoves either side of bedroom fireplaces (which, themselves, are now purely decorative - before you start thinking we don’t have central heating!)
I ‘think’ doreen is saying that ‘mason’ is reserved for someone who crafts stone, which is certainly how I would use the term - imagine someone crafting gargoyles on an old church. Someone building a standard home is simply a bricklayer, or generic ‘builder’. Someone putting up walls inside a home might be a drywall installer.
Yes, and even in winter. The only way I can vent my kitchen is through the window. So I have to let cold air in to exchange with the kitchen air. Keeping the kitchen doors closed keeps that cold air from spreading through the rest of the house.