Beyond the three-bedroom house

Abstract

This report investigates the hypothesis; That the three-bedroom house - the traditional dwelling type which features largely in the New Zealand residential scene, and which many New Zealanders have come to accept as the 'standard' dwelling type - is no longer the most appropriate model to meet today's housing requirements given the demographic and social changes which have occurred over the last fifty years. The report finds that there is now substantial diversity in today's society, in the ways in which New Zealanders are structured into households (as compared to 1936), creating a greater need for particular forms of housing other than the three-bedroom house. The predominance of this model in the New Zealand housing scene is anachronistic. It is the New Zealand Building Code (1992) which now provides the long needed opportunity to address the irrelevance of the standard three-bedroom house model to many groups in the population. This code more readily allows new and innovative departures from the 'standard' model, specifically in the area of individual house planning, thus enabling the wide and varied range of housing requirements to be met.