Three-bedroom house design: the plan most Brisbane families end up with

The three-bedroom house is the Brisbane default. Most of the pre-war and post-war houses in the city were built with three bedrooms, most first renovations keep three, and even the families who build bigger often find that three well-planned bedrooms and a second living room serve them better than five small ones. This is what a good three-bedroom plan needs, and how we get an old house to it.

Why three works

Two bedrooms for the people who live there, one for a guest, a study or the child who comes later. The house stays a size one person can clean and one air conditioner can run. And when it is sold, three bedrooms is the size the most buyers are looking for. The number is rarely the problem. The plan around it is.

The Queenslander plan, and what is wrong with it

The typical 1920s to 1950s Queenslander has three bedrooms and a lounge off a central hall, with the kitchen, a bathroom and a sleep-out or enclosed verandah at the back. The bedrooms are good rooms: high ceilings, casement windows, VJ walls. The back is the problem. The kitchen is small and faces the yard through one window, the bathroom is where the laundry should be, and nobody can see the garden from anywhere they sit.

The fix, in almost every case, is to leave the three bedrooms and the front of the house alone and rebuild the back as one room for cooking, eating and living, open to a deck at floor level. The old bathroom becomes the laundry or a second toilet. A new bathroom goes between the bedrooms, where the plumbing can share a wall with the kitchen. We describe the structure of opening up the back in our note on open plan living in a Queenslander.

Where the third bedroom goes

In a new plan the third bedroom should be the flexible one. Near the front door and the living area, so it works as a study or a guest room without walking through the house; large enough for a double bed and a desk; with a built-in wardrobe so it never needs freestanding furniture. In a Queenslander that room is often the old front lounge, which has the best window in the house.

Wet areas on one wall

A three-bedroom house wants one bathroom, one ensuite if the plan allows, a separate toilet and a laundry. Put them on one wall and the plumbing is short, the noise is contained and the cost drops. In a raised Queenslander that wall wants to be over a part of the undercroft you can get to, so the pipes can be reached later. This is the kind of thing that decides where rooms go, and it is decided in the design stage, not by the plumber on site.

Storage

Built-in wardrobes in every bedroom, a linen cupboard in the hall, a pantry off the kitchen, a broom cupboard by the laundry. Storage that is drawn into the walls costs a few thousand dollars in joinery and saves the rooms from furniture. The old houses often have a redundant hall cupboard or a piece of verandah that becomes the pantry.

Outside

The living room opens onto a covered deck, at the same level, as wide as the house, facing north or east if the block allows. In Brisbane this is not a luxury; it is the room the family uses most. On a raised house it is also the room with the view.

Keeping it cool

Before the air conditioner, the plan. Windows on two sides of every room, high ceilings kept, a ceiling fan in every bedroom and the living area, and the western wall shaded by a verandah, a tree or a screen. A three-bedroom house planned this way needs air conditioning for a few weeks a year, not a few months.

If you are in a three-bedroom house that does not work and are not sure whether to renovate or move, bring the floor plan to a free meeting at the studio. The Queenslander renovation that fixes the back of the house is the most common job we do, and we can tell you in an hour whether yours is one of them.