Standard of a bathroom (House design metrics)

A quality and sustainable houses is necessary to have a standard quality of bathroom. In terms of essential practicality, the bathroom is used often in our daily life, without it people just could not live comfortably. For example, the shower might be sounds not really important to us, but it is used at least once per day. Second, from the view of resale value, some buyers when purchasing a new home, the first things that he/she may look at is the bathroom condition. Besides, a better interior of the house could easily to attract the buyers consideration.


In addition, there are few standards for the designer for referencing when designing a house. The most heard standard is "Parker Morris Standard". "In one, two and three bedroom dwellings, one flushing toilet is required, and it may be in the bathroom". As human life compared to olden days has improved a lot, it is now important to have a bathroom in every drawling instead of few families sharing one. Besides, there is another standard by National House Building Council (NHBC), however the minimum standard for the bathroom is very small. The diagram below is the standard of gross internal floor area that Parker Morris suggested.

As everyone should have many stuffs at home and need a space for storage, Parker Morris Standard also mentioned about each home needs to have a store room for storage. For Oxley Woods, as you can see the in the floor plan below, there is a store room below the stairs on the ground floor.


Metric handbook is a reference about the latest construction standards and new building types. It also presented the idea of sustainable design. It  gives the requirements when designing, it also status out the regulations for the designer needs to be aware of when designing a building.

You can see the floor plan of Oxley Woods, 3 bedrooms dwelling also includes with 1 WC and two bathrooms. And the size of each WC are reasonable enough. As Oxley Woods is an example of a sustainable housing, ventilation has to be considered. Therefore, each toilet has included with a window, even if cleansing or dyeing hair, the window can easily to get rid of the smells from the chemical. A window in the toilet can even get more natural light in during the day time, it is more eco-friendly and saved the cost of the bill due to lessen the use of electricity.

Reference: HATC Limited . (August 2006). Housing Space Standards. Available: http://legacy.london.gov.uk/mayor/planning/docs/space-standards.pdf. Last accessed 17th Oct 2013.