Housing | “You couldn’t have lived in a booth like that” – Residents criticized the foundations of the new apartments

From Helsinki Pauli from Hanko it sucks. He bought a two-bedroom apartment in Laajasalo that feels like a hotel room.

The kitchen is on one wall of the space advertised as a living room, the fridge is next to the coat rack in the hall and there are three drawers: one for cutlery, one for pots and the third for food items.

“The kitchen looks nice, but it has very little storage space. Of course I could clean the dishes.”

In the suburbs in the opinion of a child of the 1970s who grew up, an apartment sold as a duplex is rather a studio apartment with a bedroom and a kitchen.

“I must be old-fashioned, but it’s annoying to cook in the living room. I’m used to a reasonable living space with a separate kitchen, living room and bedroom.”

Space Hankonen’s apartment has 45 square meters. It is less than his late great aunt’s 20th century studio apartment, which had 50 square meters and a large kitchen.

Hankonen would have liked to buy an apartment with the layout of past decades, but:

“They are no longer built like that, or at least I can’t afford it. Even now there is a lot of borrowing.”

The apartment cost about 230,000 euros.

Helsinki In the past week, Sanomat has told about the problematic floor plans of new apartments, which cause difficulties in everyday living. The foundations have been criticized by both researchers and architects.

Read more: “Embarrassing” – The professor compares the floor plans of modern duplexes to apartments in the GDR

Read more: The impractical floor plans of new apartments receive satikut from the researcher

We also asked readers about apartment foundations. There were almost a hundred answers. They repeat Hankonen’s kitchen-cum-kitchen, dark hallways, and long and narrow apartments that make decorating difficult.

Some of the respondents say that due to the lack of free wall space, the home does not always fit boards, let alone a bookshelf. When there are windows on only one wall, sometimes the furniture obscures the view.

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“I must be old-fashioned, but it’s annoying to cook in the living room.”

Hankon would also like to decorate more, but due to the difficult housing base, it is difficult. For example, in the bedroom there is room for a bedside table only on one side of the bed.

“I have a couple of dominant pieces of furniture: a nice bookshelf that I inherited and a former linen closet that serves as a bar cabinet.”

A design armchair would be nice, but there is no more space for it or the dining table in the apartment, says Hankonen.

“I live alone and manage, but if there was a couple here, it would be cramped.”

When from Vantaa Johanna Keränen was looking for a three-room apartment for his family, he went to see, among other things, a new three-room apartment of about 50 square meters, the living room kitchen of which could only fit a two-seater sofa, a television in front of it and a small dining table next to it.

The apartment was not acquired.

“It would not have been possible to live in such a booth with three children. In the older triangle, the rooms are big and you can walk around without knocking yourself over.”

It saddens him that the prices of ordinary family apartments have run out of the reach of a normal person.

Many of those who responded to HS’s survey mention that they suffer in two-room apartments, whose bedrooms are so small that the bed has to go around through the living room.

This solution, called a “GDR apartment” and a “Norwegian bedroom”, has also been criticized by the architects interviewed by HS.

Experts have already pointed out that new apartments do not respond well to people’s changing life situations.

Inflexibility a resident who won the hitas lottery a few years ago has been able to experience it concretely. Now he lives in a 44-square-meter two-room apartment in Koskela, Helsinki.

While the apartment was being completed, his life changed: a baby was born in the family. According to the resident, the apartment worked for a while when living alone and with occasional overnight guests.

“But when it was necessary to get a quiet sleeping space for the dog, retrofitting the sliding doors at one’s own expense was practically mandatory.”

The door opening must be covered in such a way that the ventilation is not disturbed. On the other hand, installing a sliding door does not completely eliminate the problems in the bedroom, because it does not isolate all sound and light.

There is no understanding for the kitchenette either. You can’t wash, for example, an oven dish in a narrow sink. A lower dishwasher won’t absorb even one day’s worth of dishes. The combined oven-microwave oven and two-plate stove, on the other hand, make it a little more difficult to prepare more complex food.

“The double room has proven to be maddeningly impractical, and a bigger room is being sought.”