#Ask The Architect - Why Do Scottish Houses Have So Little Storage Space?

Here's one of the questions I received for Ask The Architect. Right or wrong my comedian friend, Mr Scoular suggested to me that women are the main decision maker in choosing the home and love cupboards. Well in my many many FREE Consultations I have to say that I have not found this to be the case.

Anyway, it is true that storage in a house is not always a high priority particularly in modern houses. I will come back to this point as I don't think that storage generally, even in old houses, was ever a priority.

At block architects my team have for the last 6 years designed dozens of new builds and assisted 100's of client's with home alterations and rennovations so I have seen many house types of various ages. None of them in my opinion have ample storage.

Let's tot it up. In an ideal world each house would have 1sq.m cloak at the front door, and at least another 2sq.m on the ground floor for crap to be stored in (if it's anything like my house). Then on the upper floor we would love 2sq,m per bedroom and a few sq.m off the top landing for linen and this doesn't include the cupboard with the huge water storage tank in it. Now, let's say that in a fairly standard 3 bed home that we would like 8-10sq.m additional storage. That's a staggering £8,000 onto the build cost based on £1,000sq.m and yes you will pay that for a cupboard. And yes that's the reason why people and developers do not add more storage into the build. Simply because people and the market will not pay for it. Think about it. Would you rather have 8.sq.m of storage space which adds little value to the property or would you prefer a 4th bedroom at 8sq.m? It's a no brainer really isn't it.

Now onto the issue of older properties having plenty of storage. Well there is perhaps an argument to accept that older properties with thicker walls had spaces build in the walls ie either side of a chimney, however many people forget that historically dwellings were occupied by a whole family ie kids, parents, grand parents and maybe an aunt or uncle. When you imagine the density of people in one dwelling there wasn't really that much storage space.

What I would suggest is that if you want a house designed from scratch that block architects can and will design storage to your needs but remember, someone has to pay for it!