ABSTRACT
Research into the amount of space that households of different sizes need is usually confined to homes at the lower ends of either the private or the affordable market. Given the opportunity, most people rent or buy as large an area as they can afford. At the upper, luxury end of the private market people buy more space so they can have larger living rooms, room for entertaining, separate dining rooms, extra bedrooms, en-suite bathrooms, utility rooms, larger hallways and, of course, more storage capacity. At this end of the market there is no need to codify how much space is needed for any given number of occupants. The situation can be compared with some of the vast nineteenth-century terrace houses with enormous rooms and space for innumerable servants and in which overall occupancy would have been very low. At the same time there would have been every reason to set standards for the minimum nineteenth-century ‘two-up, twodowns’ that covered vast areas of Victorian cities and in which many people endured miserable, overcrowded lives.
