No, downtown Amsterdam has a fixed, traditional parcel width of 4 meters something for houses along the main canals and roads. The reason was that access to the canal system was essential for trading contors. A lot of them are restaurants or other public places now which caused the need to find creative ways dealing with these limits and the need to cram kitchens, restrooms and what ever seems barely possible in there.
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16ft = 4.something m.
My point was that narrow houses aren’t something new.
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Is he expecting a normal person to actually buy it for that much, or is he asking a ridiculous sum because it’s an art piece and art buyers are more willing to be irrational? Or is he hoping to trick some foreign investor who sees a 4 story building in Toronto and needs a place to park his money?
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The sink and toilet should be swapped in that house, otherwise getting on the toilet is awkward with the door there. I also find it interesting that the Kitchen doesn’t have a designated space for the fridge. It’s going to have to be just to the right of that door, but that’s going to be really tight.
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In my neighborhood, the city is thinking about raising the max height of buildings from 2.5 to 3 stories and people are PISSED. I like the idea of in-filling but you have to be respectful of your neighbors views.
This summer there was an incentive program to get solar panels installed before the 30% tax credit runs out. Imagine if you spent thousands on a system only to have a 4 storey monolith go up to the south of you.
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What an ass. He built that damned eyesore and shit all over his neighborhood. What a champ.
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A return to the old style.
From Lucy Worsely’s “if Walls could talk”
When James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited the Isle of Skye in 1773, the latter slept in the actual bed at Flora Macdonald’s house in which Bonnie Prince Charlie had spent the night when he was on the run from the English a few years previously. Mrs Macdonald even had the Bonnie Prince’s own dirty sheets kept safe and reverently unwashed, and was rather ghoulishly saving them for the wrapping of her own corpse.
Boswell noted that on this remote Scottish island people continually came barging into his bedroom. ‘During the day, the bedrooms were common to all … children and dogs not excepted.’ He was rather surprised by this because, by the Georgian age, the wealthy urban classes had begun for the first time to expect to be left alone in their bedrooms.
The conventional design of a middling seventeenth-century house - perhaps a farmer’s, or a tradesman’s - had an upper floor with the bedrooms leading off each other. This meant that the users of the second room could only access it through the first. In the eighteenth-century townhouse, though, an increasing demand for privacy meant that space was now being given over purely to circulation. The classic tall, thin, terraced townhouse had a landing on each floor,
with two separate bedrooms opening off it. Now the people occupying the smaller, back bedroom could reach their room directly from the stairs, without passing through someone else’s room first.
The next step, in larger houses, would be the corridor: its appearance at the very end of the seventeenth century allowed every bedroom to become completely independent and private. Cassandra Willoughby, an interested poker-about in other people’s houses, thought it worth noting with approval in 1697 that one Mr Arthington’s new house had an arrangement of balconies which allowed ‘a very convenient passage from one room to another without making any of the Bed Chambers a thorough fair’.
So the Georgians began to treat their bedrooms as more exclusive, private spaces than the Tudors had done. It became customary to hang a bedroom door so that it opened inwards, towards the bed. ‘The idea behind this is that the person entering shall not be able to take in the whole room at a glance as he opens the first crack of the door,’ explained Hermann Muthesius, a German commentator on British homes, in 1904. Instead, a visitor must circumnavigate the door ‘to enter the room, by which time the person seated in the room will have been able to prepare himself suitably for his entry’.
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Oh no, a tall poppy! Better chop it down!
Edit: yeah, @DinkumThinkum, you too.
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My first thought was that they should’ve installed an elevator.
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It can get ugly on uniform blocks…
…and dangerous when people decide to dig down for more living space:
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Toronto is insane, like London. A lot of it is foreign owned, money moved overseas and locked in non-liquid assets for safe keeping. Inflated value is a feature for those folks, not a problem.
You can get a good house in Minneapolis / St. Paul for under $200k, easily. I paid under $100k 8 years ago.
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In the video, the builder says they considered it seriously, but in the end decided that the small elevators aren’t very reliable. They put closets in those spaces instead.
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That’s a stupid living space and at that price he can jump off of a bridge. I can’t wait to see these cities empty out or the bottom to fall out of this investor market. That said we’ve all been holding our breath on that one for a couple of decades now. Probably more likely that these buildings will just remain empty until their turned into shopping centers or something. We know our political leaders won’t do a damned thing.
I’ll have to look for studies on that. Incidents that make the news here are often related to the lack of emergency alert or phone, but that could be solved by the owner/user.
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A small, manually-operated 2’ x 3’ dumb-waiter would have been handy and would not have consumed oodles of space. For getting luggage in and out, sending up breakfast. I see a lot of stair-climbing in any owner’s future.
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Yeah. The Toronto market is wild, but they never did sell the cube homes.
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Is that a balcony for ants?
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They invented the single wide?
