The Ideal One Bedroom Apartment

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

The Ideal One Bedroom Apartment

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The Ideal One Bedroom Apartment

Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce.

On today’s show we’re talking about the design of an optimal one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes architects can lead a project down a dead-end path. If left to their own devices, architects can design what they think the market wants, but it’s only from their perspective.

The design process needs to be constrained to fit the needs of the market from a product definition point of view, and then with thinking about the market demands, with the knowledge of the competition and what else the competition is building. You’re thinking of the aesthetics, the cost, the lifestyle, the function, the zoning, the building code, affordability in the market, and so on. And then finally, the product has to meet the constructability criteria for the local trades in the market.

You might have an idea to build apartments using a new building technology, but if the local trades aren’t familiar with it and you’re going to be required to bring in trades from outside, the savings might not be there. There’s many different ways to build a building. The simplest is to have a structural grid in which the structural walls are the interior walls, including the demising walls between apartments. That gives you the flexibility of making the exterior walls non-structural. When you start with this simple structural grid, the design of the apartments becomes cost-effective.

Now there’s different sizes of apartments. There are studios, one bedrooms, one-plus-dens, two bedrooms. On today’s show we’re going to focus only on the one-bedroom apartment and think about design criteria that go into that one-bedroom apartment.

Let’s start with size. The ideal rentable area is between 550 and 700 square feet. That’s that functional sweet spot. Below 500 square feet functionality degrades unless rents truly justify micro units. Above 750 square feet you’re giving away space that probably you’re not going to get back in additional rent. So the principle here is to optimize the usability per square foot, not just the square footage itself. That means you don’t want to be losing a lot of space to interior circulation.

The ideal dimension from the exterior wall of the building to the interior hallway is somewhere between 28 to 30 feet. The living room and the bedrooms will all have windows on the exterior wall, and the rest will be in the interior. That includes the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry, closets, everything else will be in the interior. You want a clear separation of public and private space. A functional one-bedroom must allow guests to enter without seeing the bed. A door between the sleeping area and the living zones is a must. The bedroom has to be usable during the day, not just at night, so you want to avoid studio-like layouts masquerading as a one-bedroom.

In terms of the design of the bedroom, this is where most plans fail. You want a minimum to fit a queen-size bed with two nightstands and a dresser. That’s important. You want at least one full wall uninterrupted by doors. So that means a minimum of 10 by 10 clear. Eleven by eleven is better. And you want to make sure that the door swing does not collide with closet doors. Closets for clothing belong inside the bedroom, not in a hallway pretending to be storage.

So when you take all of these dimensions into account, along with the wall thickness, the minimum width for a one-bedroom apartment along the exterior wall is 25 feet. That gives you an 11-foot bedroom and a 12-foot-wide living room, plus another 2 feet for wall thickness. Anything less than that is going to feel cramped.

Let’s go to the bathroom. Bathroom placement matters more than the size. Now the smallest you can build a bathroom is in 35 square feet. That would be 5 by 7. Standard dimension for a bathtub is 5 feet. That’s going to define one of the dimensions. The other is simply going to be the size of the vanity and the toilet. I personally prefer 40 square feet, 5 by 8. That gives you a little bit more elbow room without it feeling cramped.

Let’s go to the kitchen. This is the hub of any house, including an apartment. You want a full appliance package, not just small appliances. That means at least eight linear feet of counter space, excluding the fridge. You want a real pantry and a tall wall cabinet. You want a clear workflow from the fridge, the sink, to the cooktop, as well as area for cleanup after the meal.

The living area has to accept real furniture. That means a full-size sofa, 7 feet in length. These larger pieces of furniture have at least a 3-foot depth. You want to have space for a coffee table and a proper media console. That means a minimum of 11 to 12 feet width.

Now these days, not everybody needs a dining room. You don’t need an actual space for a table or a formal dining room. But there has to be enough space for at least a couple to sit down and have a proper meal. It’s not just the space for the table, but space for clear circulation that doesn’t block doors.

Storage in an apartment is vitally important. You want to have a certain amount, obviously the bedroom closet, a linen closet, kitchen storage beyond the base cabinets. Lack of storage creates clutter. It creates damage, and it creates turnover.

One of the biggest topics of debate is whether an apartment needs to have a balcony. Balconies get very rarely used, and yet, even with that knowledge, tenants do expect to have them. They want them. If an apartment doesn’t have a balcony, tenants feel trapped in the building.

And then, the other major design criteria relates to noise. You want to make sure that you’ve designed the wet walls vertically. You want to avoid head-to-head bedroom adjacency wherever possible. The mechanical closets should be isolated from sleeping walls. That reduces not only complaints, but also the construction costs.

The choice of heating system absolutely makes a big difference. The types of wall-mounted heat pumps and AC units that you see in many hotels are cost-effective, but they’re also very noisy. There are lower-noise alternatives that can make a difference in the living experience. The demising walls and the ceilings should have great noise attenuation. I’m not going to get into all of the technical aspects of this, but there are techniques that are not that expensive that truly improve noise isolation.

And the last point relates to the building envelope itself. There’s a trade-off between building height and costs. A taller building lowers your land cost per unit. You have less foundation, less roof area. But then a tall building is also going to be structurally more expensive to build. As you increase that, the cost per unit goes down, and then it goes back up. A 650 to 700 square foot one-bedroom apartment in a mid-rise building is often the sweet spot.

As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. And I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

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