Speaker A
Welcome to Slow Home Studio. Too many people have badly designed houses, and we want to change that. This is our second week of February, where we're looking at bedroom design, and today we're going to be looking at the common pitfalls that we've found, the biggest problems that we found in the design of bedrooms. I love looking at common pitfalls because it's interesting, and I do like making fun of people, and this is exactly what not to do. So let's have a look at the first common pitfall, and this is common, common college, what I wrote about in the Avenue magazine. It's all about supersizing. Yeah, it's just grotesque how big that is. I mean, this is a bedroom that is bigger than most people's living room, dining room, kitchen areas, right? So here we've got our king-sized bed over in the corner, and then we've got all of this extra space. We've got a fireplace, but we've got a ton of basically right, and there's nothing wrong with having a fireplace and having a place to sit. That's not my argument. My argument is all the rest of this space. What are you going to do with all of it except walk around and maybe, you know, put all your dirty clothes in the center of that room, really? Or you could actually lay out your tent or a kayak or something if you're going to go camping. But really, what are you going to do with that? It's a waste of air. It is a waste of money. So this is the opposite, and when you supersize one part of the house, everything else suffers. And this poor child is going to have this bedroom that is really suffering because this is a single bed jammed into the corner in order to be able to still open up those closet doors, and it's only got one sad little window onto a side yard. Yeah, what's our rule of thumb in terms of bedroom dimensions? We sort of think that the minimum bedroom dimension is around 10 feet in one direction, right? Like that. If you have a bedroom that is 8 feet, 9 feet, it's too small. You don't have enough room to fit a bed or another piece of furniture. No. And, you know what? When you're measuring or if you're looking at a house, open the closet doors and see how far they swing out and think about that dimension because that's really critical as well. Another common problem is the oddly shaped room. Look at this thing. It's got more angles than Trafalgar Square. You know, it just makes your monitor angle. They realize, I don't understand why people introduce 45-degree angles into these houses. There's no need for it. It only creates all these problems. Beds are rectangular pieces of furniture. They're not angular. They're not triangular. It's hard to furnish a rectangular piece of furniture in rooms that have angles that are well, and some people might wonder why did you put the bed right there? And it's because this is the only piece, this is the only length of wall that's actually long enough to be able to have the bed sit against it. If you put it here, you're going to be right up against those closet doors. So you're going to put it here, and then that's where you've got the issue. Yeah. And then this is our last example. This is a personal pet peeve. It's a personal pet—you don't really get rid of it. You know what? This one doesn't really bother me, but I'm humoring you and allowing this. All right, so I'm just going to throw it back to everybody else. Does anybody else have a problem with this? And do you know what this problem happens to be? Okay, well, I can't hear you, so I'm going to just assume that you're all agreeing with me and not with Matthew. And it's really, it's here. I cannot stand it when you walk through the door and you see the end of the closet like that. It is such a waste because basically you're just putting this big lump in the corner, and you really want to be able to walk right into that room and not have your progress, your circulation, or your visual field obstructed by that wall. Do you feel better now that you can? I do. I feel better. So the next episode, what we're going to look at is how to design a proper bedroom. See you next time. If you're interested in learning more about the principles of slow home design, you can pick up a copy of our book entitled What's Wrong with This House? It's a practical guide to finding a well-designed and sustainable home. It's available for sale on the Slow Home Studio website. It's also available for sale at Amazon.com in both paperback and the Kindle format.
