My (blind now) BIL point out that putting a different color of carpet on the last step, and the first step is deliberate. It’s easier for the site impaired to navigate stairs. This is often done on landings too. I’ve noticed this in a few buildings. That makes sense.
I’m sure it can be poorly executed though.
Yeah it was a lot like that but without the stairway. Actually a stairway would have been easier, more vertical space to work with.
My dream house is a Japanese-adjacent courtyard house with 2 boxes that are also connected by walkways, but I have at least thought about bathrooms and kitchens. I also would ideally have the entire thing enclosed, but if the central courtyard with its water feature needed to be open for expense purposes, you’d at least have a half bath and half kitchen in each section. If you needed to take a shower or cook a meal and it’s raining outside, you might get wet if you’re in the wrong half, granted.
Hey, at least it doesn’t let you exit the wrong building on the fifth floor…
Sounds very pretty, and you could not pay me enough to live in a house like that. My parents’ summer house was in one of the easiest climates for humans in the whole world, the California middle coast where it doesn’t snow or get particularly hot either. It was still miserable much of the time. Japanese houses were not designed to be insulated.
Also, it could not have had a worse design for earthquake country, or wildfire country.
In my opinion, you start with basics of house building – it stays up, sheds water, is as warm in winter and cool in summer as you can design, it lets in light in the proper places, and shelters from the sun in others. After that, you can get fancy. This architect so disregarded the above criteria that it didn’t matter how cool it looked.
I think he wasn’t (and isn’t) alone in his architectural thinking. Which I find, frankly, contemptible.
Anything Brutalist.
Ugly, Soviet-esque, designed to belittle the occupant.
Hard to heat, to cool, & with humidity on the walls.
Impossible to modify, because it is 100% poured concrete.
Inflexible & profoundly unattractive.
The modern world has triumphantly made almost everything it touches ugly, but I agree Brutalism is a high water mark in that quest.
University of Oregon has an old building with a large number of entry doors, but the interior is partitioned so you can’t get from oddly-shaped section to section. There is no posted map.
I’ve stayed in several small European pensiones where the only window is onto an airshaft, but there’s no curtain and if anyone has a light on, it illuminates all the rooms.
Oh–and the “Phildo,” a.k.a. the Blunt:
Once stayed at a single person ultra budget hotel, the one where the hotel room is basically the size of two twin beds side by side and the bathroom was a fully enclosed sealed room because the entire room was basically a standing room only shower. The toilet was directly underneath the shower head, which meant if you didn’t raise the seat the water from the shower would just bounce off it and get everywhere. Also meant you didn’t have to flush the toilet because the water from the shower would hit the toilet bowl until it auto flushed.
When we were shopping for condos (~20 years ago), there was one place where the only windows were floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. That whole wall was used as one side of the living room and the bedroom was a rectangular box in the middle of the rectangular floorplan, so all of the other open-plan living areas surrounded it like a moat. I think the bedroom had some windows that faced the interior of the condo? I imagine someone must have loved the layout, but it seemed strange to us at the time.
I’ve been surfing real estate ads a lot the last couple of years, and I’ve concluded that about 80% of modern condo designs are utter trash. They might work as a hotel, where you stay for a week, and don’t expect to spend much time actually living in it, but for a permanent home? “Open concept” kitchens that are just a wall of appliances, that end up dominating the living area. “Living rooms” where you can put in a TV, or a couch, but not both. “Bed rooms” that open directly on the living area, via huge sliding doors/walls, that make it hard to put anything else on or near the wall, because the sliding part will almost certainly hit anything near the wall.
About the only parts that aren’t routinely completely awful are the bathrooms.
Since this thread appeared, I’m getting ads for multi-family balcony rails and Quonset huts.
Ventilation would be my guess.
I once stayed at an expensive hotel room that was very tiny (in Mayfair, London, so expensive partly because of the location), which had in its bedroom only a twin bed and a small desk and chair. When I laid out my luggage on the floor, there wasn’t enough room to use the desk without bumping into things.
But the bathroom had plenty of room. It was almost as big as the bedroom. Maybe I should have put my luggage in the bathroom!
The architect of a building I used to work in wasn’t an outright Brutalist, but he must have been a full-on Modernist and he didn’t want his gloriously functional steel-framed box to be disfigured by guttering and downspouts. But the building was located in South Wales where it is impossible to deny the rain. So he came up with an ingenious idea to have the roof slope inwards, with a drain in the middle connected to a pipe running through the core of the building. From the ground outside, it looked like a flat roof and no visible guttering was needed. Modern!
And how did it work in practice? Well, very well - until the autumn, when the trees in the adjacent park dropped a whole lot of leaves, which got blown up onto the roof, from where the autumn rains washed them down into the central drain, which blocked.
When building maintenance were alerted to this (by the streams of water running off the roof and flowing down the walls), they discovered that the blocked drain they had to tackle was now in the middle of the newly-filled roof pool. Under about four feet of water.
I stayed in a place in Singapore that sounds like it was about the same size. Difference was, the bed was on a raised platform, so you could easily store your luggage under it, and there were actual stairs for getting into and out of bed. For such a small room, it was actually quite cleverly laid out.
And it was about a five minute walk from the pub in Singapore that I really wanted to visit (I knew the owner). Score!
I give them some slack because they’re converting an existing building into living space rather than it being designed for living from the get-go.
I stay at an event hotel in NJ every year. There are five guest floors + lobby/conf rooms/ballroom/etc, so six story building. There are about 80 rooms per floor, numbered from 1-80; all of the room numbers are in the same place, so room 3xx is directly above 2xx & directly below 4xx. Makes sense, right? As would be logical, every floor has room 66 between rooms 65 & 67.
A lot of taller buildings don’t have a 13th floor because people are superstitious. In this hotel, I’ve stayed across from (but not in) room 666! Why not just skip room 66 on the five floors to keep the numbering the same but not freak anyone out? I wonder how often they’re asked to change someone’s room when the guest gets their room number?
The condo building I lived in was missing a 4th, 13th and 14th floor and units 4, 13 and 14 on each floor (probably because the number 4 is unlucky in some areas of China). So our door number said we lived in unit 2016, but the ownership documents said we lived in unit 1713.
In 2013 my dad and I went to San Franciso and lucked into a good deal at the Sir Francis Drake. The bedroom of my hotel room wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t figure out how to sit on the toilet and have a closed bathroom door at the same time.