Measurements…agh!
Unless you work with measurements as part of your job or hobby you may not have thought about metres and millimetres, feet and inches since you were at school. And, because this is Britain where we are supposedly metric but reference many things only in imperial measurements you may be self-taught in one or other of the systems or not feel confident in your grasp of either.
Architects in Britain work in millimetres, at least in design and contract documents. That’s annoying for a lot of people because if you remember anything metric from school it was probably in centimetres not millimetres. 100 centimetres in a metre, right, so when your designer is telling you the worktop is 600 deep you are understandably thrown…wait, 6 metres??? Meanwhile your builder is talking about 2 x 4s and 6 inch slabs and you know your height in feet and inches but your dining table is 1.6 meters long.
How can you make sense of the dimensions shown on a drawing and visualize the size of the spaces you hope to get?
I’m not going to get into the history and theory, there's plenty online and I like this factsite if you want to take a look.
The imperial system is more closely linked to the proportions of the human body than the metric system. Scale and proportion are fundamental to architectural theory and there is a nice summary of this here. I have surveyed many buildings of all ages in Britain, including some stately homes for period dramas in my role as Art Director. I believe that the imperial measurements for spaces feel familiar to us - a high percentage of our homes were built before metrification - Office for National Statistics, - so I will often lean towards dimensions in multiples of 3, like 2400mm rather than 2500mm, because that just feels right to me.
Let's do a quick refresher on units of measurements and then talk about how to visualize the sizes of spaces without walking into them.
10 millimetres (mm) = 1 centimetre(cm)
1000 mm = 1 metre(m)
I am self taught in imperial and not at all quick with conversions so these are my little cheats:
25mm is 1 inch
100mm is 4 inches
300mm is 1 foot (12 inches)
1m is 3 foot
1.8m is 6 foot
2.4m is 8 foot
If people speak to me in feet and inches I try to relate the number back to one of these. One trick is to visualize a standard school ruler. These measure 30cm, 12 inches or 1 foot and so you could try to picture multiples of school rulers when you are when you are looking at measurements for a fitted kitchen say.
For longer measurements, get yourself a tape measure and measure a room that is familiar to you. Then – commit it to memory, and do the bathroom too so you have another reference, but don't do too many rooms or you will forget all of them and be back to square one.
I would also recommend measuring bits of your body (behave!) like the height of your waist (counter height? Window sill height?), the height of your eye line (windows sight lines)…speaking of heights:
Don’t forget the ceiling!
Admittedly, an extension usually has room heights to match your existing but perhaps your designer is suggesting you step down into the new area to get more height, or that you must lower a ceiling to convert your loft, or that the height in the loft will be very tight indeed. Room height is especially personal because a 5ft 4 person (1.62m) will experience the space and head height very differently to a 6ft 2 person (1.88m).
Here is the living room and hall that we looked at in the post about reading plans.
The ceiling height for these two spaces is 2.4m. That’s pretty standard for this age of house which is 1930s. Victorian town houses tend to have higher ceilings, newer houses tend to be more like 2.3m. Cottages and castles are laws unto themselves.
When you go to other people’s houses, or bars or hotels, try to guess the sizes of different rooms you find yourself in – mentally overlay the space you know. A door is usually about 2m tall (6ft 6) so use that to gauge whether the ceiling is high or low.
Next let’s look at the clues to the size of a space on architectural drawings.
On sections and elevations we can add people. I try to use a 6ft man and a 5ft 6ish woman (I know, not metric, but this is Britain, like I said). There’s no rule about how tall my figures are though so if I wanted to be cheeky I could use a shorter figure to make my space look more generous.
On plans we use furniture and fittings to do a similar thing. I appreciate these do not always look intuitive and require another brain flip to visualize flattened furniture in your room.
Let's imagine you have always wanted a corner sofa. How will it fit in the living room?
I mean, it's ok, but it's not great.
If you have particular furniture or fittings in mind do tell your designer. Often people tell me they don’t want to think about that until they walk into the space – but how awful would it be, to get that far and find that your sofa is just a smidge too big?
And furniture can be another thing that is sneakily 'scaled to fit' on a drawing- see estate agents' double bedroom plans for example. A double bed might be 1.4m wide (4ft6), or 1.8m(6ft) wide and that 400mm difference is a big deal when you are also fitting in wardrobes and dressing tables. So check what size has been drawn.
Coming soon - ideas for master bedroom layouts.
In the meantime, here's a full furniture layout for one of the extension ideas explored previously - now with WC/utility room and open plan dining/kitchen and living - with and without dimensions. The corner sofa dimensions in all these drawings match the Habio Small Corner Sofa which is a very neat design for smallish houses.
And if you like corner sofas – I saw this one in the wonderful Norwich Jarrold’s shop earlier this year and I would honestly design a space to fit this sofa rather than the other way round if you asked me to!
Comments