Narrow block house designs: light, stairs and the long wall

Much of inner Brisbane was cut up into blocks of ten metres by forty, and the workers' cottages built on them are still there. When those cottages are past saving or too small to extend, the block that is left is narrow, deep and worth a great deal, and the question is how to put a good house on it. We have designed and built a number of these. The problems are the same each time and so, broadly, are the answers.

What the block fixes

A ten-metre lot with the standard side setbacks leaves a building about seven metres wide. Council may allow one wall to be built on or near a boundary, which gives back a metre and a half but means a wall with no windows along one side of the house. The front setback is usually set by the neighbours. So the plan is a strip, seven or eight metres wide, with windows at the front and the back and one long blind wall. Everything else follows from that.

The long wall

The boundary wall is the spine of the house. It takes the things that do not need windows: the stair, the bathrooms, the laundry, the pantry, the wardrobes and the services. Putting those in a continuous run along the blind side leaves the whole of the other side free for rooms with light. It also means the plumbing runs in one wall, which is cheaper and quieter.

Light from above

With windows only at each end, the middle of a forty-metre house is dark. There are three ways in. A courtyard cut into the plan, open to the sky, which gives the middle rooms a window and the house a private outdoor space that no neighbour can see. A void with a skylight over the stair, so light falls through two floors. And highlight windows along the top of the boundary wall where the neighbour's roof allows. Most narrow houses we design use two of the three.

The stair as the spine

Building up is how a narrow block gets its floor area, and the stair is the most important object in the house. Placed against the long wall around the middle of the plan, it divides the ground floor into a front room and a back room without a wall, and lands upstairs in the centre so the bedrooms can go either way. An open stair with a skylight over it is also the house's main light well. A stair pushed into a corner does none of this.

Where the car goes

A garage across the front of a seven-metre house uses most of the frontage and puts a roller door where the front room should be. Where the street allows, a single carport or an open car space under the front of the house, with the entry beside it, keeps a window on the street. On a corner or a rear lane the car can go elsewhere entirely. This is the decision that most shapes how the house meets the street, and it should be made first.

The back of the block

Forty metres is long. A house of fifteen or eighteen metres leaves a proper back yard, and the living areas should open onto it at floor level with the widest door the structure allows. On the deep blocks we sometimes put the living at the back and the bedrooms toward the street, so the family lives facing the garden and the bedrooms take the traffic noise with their doors closed.

Renovate, extend or start again

If the cottage on the block is a pre-1947 house under the character overlay, its front stays and the new house is built behind and under it, which on a narrow lot can work well because the old house already sits close to the boundary. If it is a post-war house with nothing to protect, a knockdown and rebuild lets the plan use the whole width from the first line. We price both from the same brief so you are choosing between numbers rather than opinions.

If you have a narrow block, bring the site plan to a free meeting. The first thing we will do is draw the strip, the long wall and the stair, and the house will start to appear.