Real Estate add a prefabricated module for his/her partner so that they feel at home too… Even if that means, of course, putting away the module if the love affair comes to end. That looks a bit like the single bed that never goes out of fashion that becomes a double bed but expanded to the whole of the house… In Alstätten, still in Switzerland, the 17 flats in a block of flats reserved for singletons were quickly snapped up. The concept works. The demand is there.
A matter of flexibility Architecture for singletons is a matter of flexibility. What can be more temporary, often, than the status of being single? The same goes for single parent families. When the children flee the nest, why not divide up the house and rent part of it? That is the essence of a project being put together by the Swiss bureau EM2N: five flats, each one with a fixed frame, namely the external walls and a central hearth. The rest of it is made up of detachable partitions that you can arrange as you wish depending on the number of bedrooms that you need. The high level of current demand for “partitioned” housing is leading to real demographic headaches: for a long time, people thought that it was enough to build housing in the same proportions at the estimated population growth. This is where singletons have now messed up the forcasts a bit by contributing to a fragmentation of households and a huge demand for “small” living spaces. One example is the Tower Hamlets area east of London. Nearly 80% of the 762 flats located in this area are occupied by singletons. In capitals,
where the types of singletons are as varied as their number, people are trying to search for housing based on making every square metre count. The London architect Stephen Taylor has looked into making houses for the City profitable. The renovation needs to “anticipate changes in the way rooms are used”, which may include a succession of different tenants. In Amsterdam, the office of Droog design aims to completely review the interior: furniture, accessories, decoration, everything is thought up “all by myself”. One Amsterdam house in two is occupied by a single
person… You can find a little bit of originality, such as a light that follows you everywhere (so that you don’t have to put the lights on in all the rooms…) or a book that is room embedded into the table of the kitchen, for those eating alone.
Olivier Standaert
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