Ok, the time has come to talk about houses in England. What can I say? They're different! It makes you realise that when you grow up in a place, you form a concept of what constitutes a house. When you travel around the world you see that houses are different on the outside, but you don't really appreciate the little things until you start looking to buy one in another country.
Part of this is because when you are growing up, you're in and out of other people's houses, your own, your extended families', friends places on sleepovers. But adults tend to meet in the pub instead.
One of the first things I asked as I was whizzing past small towns on the train, with lots of new developments was why on earth does everybody build their house the same??? That was the first lesson - nobody builds their own house. Here the term developer means someone who buys land and builds anything from 10 to many houses. People buy them off the plan long before the earth's been broken, and there are usually maybe 3 or 4 different sizes in the development. And here's the catch - not only do they all have identical coloured bricks, tiles etc but I'm told that usually to get council permission that's what they have to do!
I gather these "new build" houses can be quite expensive as you often have to add all the fittings yourself, which hopefully makes them a bit more unique on the inside.
Next thing I learnt was the different types of houses you get here, terraced, semi-detached and fully detached. As far as I can tell the difference is purely on how many common walls you have, there's not much difference on the inside. Ah, the inside. Hmm, how do I put it. Whether it's a terrace or a full detached house, they tend to be a room and a hallway wide. I've sort of got used to it now, but the first time I walked into a detached house I was looking around for the rest of it. It was a one bedroom house. In my experience, a one bedroom place was a flat, not a full house. Don't get me started on the bathrooms though.
It was the semi detached concept that got me though. To be honest, I find the concept obscene. They actually build them that way! When I first saw what to me looked like an ordinary sized house (I've since learnt better of course), and realised that there were actually two houses there I figured someone had come along and split them up later on, like a regular subdivision. OK , I thought, that makes sense. But nope, go down a new development and there will be all these little half houses. If they took the same amount of land and joined these all up into terraces, everyone could have a full size house!
Speaking of which, I also learnt the meaning of the term "double fronted terrace". No, it's not to do with the thickness of the walls or anything like that. It means that you've got one room either side of the front door! Also, the traditional 2 up, 2 down house doesn't mean two bedrooms on each floor. No, it literally means two rooms downstairs and 2 upstairs.
The narrowness of the houses leads to some places having long narrow gardens (I suggested they'd make excellent lap pools - more blank looks). Hence the expression fairies at the bottom of the garden. I can easily see that the bottom of the garden could be a long way away and hide all sorts of exotic things.
Lots of people have said something to me like, oh, well you're from Australia, they have massive houses over there don't they? Drill down a bit and you realise they're talking exclusively about Neighbours. And now I have to agree, the average suburban house portrayed on Neighbours is *huge*!! (OMG). I tried to explain that those houses belonged to ordinary people and they just look at me in bewilderment.
To be fair, the terrace house that I'm in the process of buying now is roughly the same size as my old house in Perth, just upwards not sideways (on 4 levels, not 2). It has a cellar and an attic! No idea how I'm going to get any furniture down the narrow stairs (flat pack Ikea here I come). Otherwise, it's a standard 2 up, 2 down except upstairs one room's been shaved off to create a little bathroom, and the attic's been converted to be another big room.
This little spiel today was triggered by two adjacent articles in a weekly property guide that lands in my mailbox. Urban Splash is a radical developer, making acclaimed fantastic spaces to live (no really, some of their apartments in old run down but historic areas are lovely). Now they're introducing two radical concepts!
The first is "upside down terrace". It took me a while to work out what that meant. It means... wait for it... the bedrooms are downstairs. This concept caused mass debate ("think of the resale value, who's going to buy a house with bedrooms downstairs?"), strongly implying that every one of the, what, 10 million? terraces houses in this country have the bedrooms on the top floor. They're a uniform lot sometimes these english, which is funny given that they've created so much great literature and music and given us all those fantastic sports to beat them in. :-)
Which leads to the second radical concept by Urban Splash - "You can design your own home!!!". Let me quote the magazine....
"I have to take my hard-hat off to the inventiveness of Urban Splash. They always manage to stay one step ahead when it comes to new ways of developing and building whether it's turning the traditional terrace on its head or pioneering the return of the pre-fab. Now they're offering self builders, architects and budding property developers the ultimate self-build opportunity"
But you have to put your design into a panel of judges, and only the funkiest will get you the chance to buy a plot and build away (my interpretation). Which, to be honest, is a pretty nice idea. There are definitely some places in Australia that could benefit from style judges.
When interviewed, the developer said "we have to admit, we nicked this idea from a firm that has worked in Amsterdam. We were showed round by them and we fell in love with this wonderful terrace where every house is different!"
So there you have it, just a few things I've had to adjust to over here when it comes to housing.
