Tag: housing design

Home with wrap-around ramp: Will it work?

rear view of the all white home at twilight. It shows the ramp coming up from ground level on one side wrapping around the back and up to the first floor on the third side.A couple in their 50s told their architects they wanted a home for four generations. The home needed to accommodate themselves, their daughter and her husband and child, and three older relatives. Focusing on the older generation, the architects made a major feature of a ramp that wraps around the house from the ground to first floor. Other floors are accessed by stairs. But was this design about functionality or creativity? Why a wrap-around ramp and not a lift that could have served all floors? And what about the accessibility of internal spaces? Perhaps there was a reason for not solving the access issues with a home lift. 

Front view of the three storey home taken at twilight.The wrap-around ramp for family members who use a wheelchair seems like a good idea until you see how long it is. A powered wheelchair could manage the ramp, but most people use a manual wheelchair indoors. Imagine pushing someone in a wheelchair on this ramp which looks quite steep.

The home is featured on the Dezeen website with photographs to show the position of the ramp and the rationale behind it. The photographs here are taken from the Dezeen article. Note that the home is in Nansong, China so there could be regulations preventing other design options. There are links to other designs for multigenerational living.

A lift would serve all family members across their lifespan and would be more useable than a ramp. It is not clear why this option was not chosen. Any member of the family can find themselves permanently or temporarily disabled at any time. So focusing on the currently disabled person produces a specialised design instead of one designed inclusively.

Home Builder goes for universal design

A view from the kitchen to the alfresco showing an adjustable bench top acting as a table.A home builder in Queensland, is building Livable Housing Silver level homes and he wants everyone else to follow his lead. He has persuaded Townsville City Council and industry stakeholders to come together to make this possible.

In a promotional video accessibility is only mentioned once at the end, but the key features are pointed out throughout the video. It’s a slow 11 minutes so recommend viewing at an increased speed setting. Although Silver level is promoted, the size and design of the dwelling makes it closer to Gold level. 

In a 9 minute video (below) various people explain the importance of Silver level to them. The best parts of the video are in the second half where Martin Locke shows how Silver level homes are modern and “normal”. One key point is that it shows there are no design or technical impediments for having Silver (or Gold) level in all new housing.

Wheelchair users are only one part of the story of universal design in housing. The emphasis on wheelchair users perpetuates the idea that this is “disability housing” and this puts it in the “specialised housing” bracket. The Livable Housing Design Guidelines are about everyone, not just wheelchair users.

Locke believes Silver level can be rolled out without additional regulation. However, after ten years of voluntary guidelines, industry has not participated. The industry, particularly  mass market builders, rely on regulation to hold the system together so that all the designers, engineers, and trades know what they are doing and can work in tandem.

It’s great to see at least one community trying to make a difference in this space. Martin Locke and the Townsville City Mayor are to be congratulated for their efforts in bringing people together to show the way for the house-building industry.

Housing, older people and resilience

An old weatherboard farm building sits in front of a tall dark brooding mountain.People want to stay put as they age. That means housing design is critical in supporting this desire, as well as ageing-in-place policies. A new study from New Zealand looked at issues of appropriate housing for older people, and how people and communities can develop resilience to adverse natural events. The findings relate to ageing societies across the globe and within the context of changing environmental conditions. The decision tools that researchers devised from this participatory research are useful for older people and for architects and other designers. 

The title of the article by Bev James and Kay Saville-Smith is “Designing housing decision-support tools for resilient older people“. There are several useful references at the end of this excellent study. 

ABSTRACT: Our ageing populations make it critical that older people continue to live and participate in their communities. ‘Ageing in place’, rather than in residential care, is desired by older people themselves and promoted as policy in many countries. Its success, both as policy and practice, depends on housing. House performance, resilience, functionality and adaptability are all essential to maintaining independence. Three New Zealand research programmes have worked with older people to investigate issues around housing, ‘ageing in place’ and how older people and communities can become resilient to adverse natural events. Using participatory research techniques, those programmes have generated evidence-based decision-support tools to help older people maintain independence. These tools have been co-designed and widely tested with older people and others. Designed to help older people identify priorities and information requirements, assess diverse factors determining thermal performance and dwelling resilience as well as repairs and maintenance needs, the tools help improve decisions around: repairs and maintenance assessment and solutions; dwelling and location choices and housing options. Various organizations have adopted the tools. This work demonstrates how research outputs can be used to facilitate older people’s housing choices while also giving architects and designers guides for meeting older people’s housing needs.

Image by David Mark.

UD in Housing: Does it really cost more?

Facade of a large two storey home commonly called a McMansionDo homes really have to be larger to incorporate universal design features? Unlikely says Kay Saville-Smith, a housing researcher from New Zealand. In her keynote address at the UD Conference in 2014 she explained why. Her presentation discussed the “size fraud” and the mistaken idea that homes need to be larger and therefore more expensive. She also referred to the “blame game” where nothing changes because no-one takes the first step. Below is an excerpt from the full transcript of her presentation, Making Universal Design a Reality – Confronting Affordability.  

“Builders like to talk about cost per square metre so the larger the living space, the cheaper the perceived cost. Although the floor space need not expand to bring in UD features, it is believed that you do. So people say they won’t pay for that – or more to the point the builders say that”.

She goes on to say, “…there are still the two old barriers to renovating and building homes with universal design and indeed the streetscape, and those two things are twofold. One is what I’ve talked about in the past as the vicious cycle of blame that goes on in the building industry, which is no-one wants to change to do anything because the other person hasn’t asked them to do it. Investors don’t want universal design, so I the builder can’t build that, but if investors want it, sure I will build it. Investors will say I can’t build it because the builder won’t come in at the right cost, and both of them blame the architect, of course, because the architect is off site at that point. So that is one issue.

The other issue is that we have the “innovation chasm” where we have solutions but getting them taken up and getting to a tipping point where it’s an expectation of what you get out of the housing market, is a big jump and typically you need about 30% or so of the market to be taking that kind of innovation challenge rather than taking the opportunity to be an early adopter. 30% is a big jump…”