Why New Apartments Feel Smaller Than Their Plans

And yet many of them feel worse to live in.

Not all, of course. There are excellent contemporary apartment buildings: intelligent, light-filled, robust, humane. But a recognizable pattern has emerged across many expensive urban housing markets. New flats are often lower, tighter, darker, deeper, more dependent on mechanical systems, and less forgiving in their plans than the best older buildings. They pass regulation. They satisfy the spreadsheet. They photograph cleanly. But daily life inside them can feel compressed, as if the home has been optimized by someone who understands finance, regulation and energy modelling, but has only read about the human body in a PDF.

The comparison with Art Nouveau and Art Deco is revealing. These earlier urban apartments were not perfect. Many had poor bathrooms, weak heating, uneven accessibility, outdated wiring and problematic ventilation by modern standards. But at their best, they had something contemporary buildings often struggle to provide: spatial generosity. Larger windows. Higher ceilings. More generous stairwells and corridors. Stronger thresholds between private and public life. Rooms shaped for furniture, not just formal occupation.

The question is not whether we should return to the past. Nostalgia is a poor architect; it draws beautifully and forgets plumbing. The real question is sharper: why have technically superior buildings so often produced lower lived quality?

The answer lies in the collision of four forces: regulation written as minimums, land values pushing maximum efficiency, energy rules that sometimes shrink openings and volumes, and a market that rewards private saleable area more than shared quality. The result is a dwelling that is legal, efficient and financially rational — but less civilized than it ought to be.

The older apartment as urban instrument

Art Nouveau and Art Deco apartment buildings were built in an age before contemporary energy codes, mechanical ventilation standards and accessibility requirements. That matters. We should not romanticize the cold bathroom, the coal stove or the staircase that quietly excludes half the population. But these buildings often had a powerful spatial intelligence.

Their windows were frequently larger and taller, partly because walls were thicker, ceilings higher, rooms deeper in volume but not always in plan, and daylight was the primary environmental technology. Before cheap electric lighting and advanced mechanical systems, the building had to negotiate directly with the sun and air. The façade was not merely an exterior image. It was the respiratory and visual system of the home.

Art Nouveau apartments in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Riga, Vienna, Barcelona or Nancy often used bay windows, tall openings, balconies, stained glass, stair skylights, winter gardens and generous entrance halls not only as decorative gestures but as ways of mediating light, air and social contact. Art Deco buildings, especially in dense twentieth-century cities, often carried forward a similar concern for vertical proportion, lobby quality, stair drama, larger window rhythms and strong transitions from street to dwelling.

These buildings were not always equitable. Many were built for the middle class or bourgeois urban households, often with service rooms and class hierarchies written into the plan. But even when social structure was unequal, the physical understanding of rooms was often better than in many contemporary speculative apartments. A living room was expected to hold furniture. A bedroom was not a mattress slot. A hallway had ceremony and function. A window had height enough to give both light and view.

The older apartment knew something that modern housing production sometimes forgets: a room is not a rectangle. It is a relationship between light, height, width, furniture, movement, sound and time.

Smaller windows: energy logic versus daylight life

The first visible difference is often the window.

Many contemporary apartment buildings have smaller window openings relative to wall area than people expect, or windows that are poorly placed in deep rooms. Sometimes the window is large enough in the façade drawing but ineffective in use: a single opening serving a combined kitchen-living room, a glazed balcony that steals light, a recessed façade shaded by overhangs, or a narrow bedroom window looking into a tight courtyard.

There are reasons for this. Windows are expensive. They are weaker than insulated wall in thermal performance. They complicate façade detailing, fire spread, overheating control, acoustic insulation, solar gain and maintenance. Triple glazing helps, but glass remains a more complex and costly element than opaque wall. In cold climates, the energy logic has often encouraged compact openings and highly insulated envelopes. In noisy urban streets, smaller or more controlled openings can help meet acoustic requirements. In hot climates, large unshaded glazing creates overheating. The humble window has become a battlefield where energy, cost, daylight, view and comfort wrestle like drunk philosophers in a lift.

But this is exactly why minimum thinking becomes dangerous.

Building codes usually require daylight, but often in ways that can be technically satisfied without producing a generous lived experience. Norway's TEK17, for example, requires rooms for permanent occupancy to have satisfactory daylight, and its guidance includes a pre-accepted performance level based on an average daylight factor of at least 2.0 percent. That is a floor, not a design philosophy.

The problem is not the existence of such standards. The problem is when developers aim for the threshold instead of the experience. A room can pass a daylight calculation while still feeling mean. The calculation may not fully capture where the light falls, how the room is furnished, whether the window gives sky view, whether the work surface is lit, whether the inhabitant feels connected to the day, or whether the room becomes gloomy for much of the year.

Older Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings often solved this by brute spatial generosity: taller windows, higher heads, deeper reveals, bay forms, corner rooms, dual-aspect plans, and ceilings that allowed light to travel farther. The façade was allowed to breathe. The windows were part of the dignity of the room.

The lesson for modern architecture is not "make every window enormous." That would be silly, and in some climates thermally stupid — the architectural equivalent of wearing a ball gown to cross-country skiing. The lesson is to design windows as instruments of habitation, not as compliance holes. A good window should do at least four things: bring daylight deep into the room, offer a usable view, open safely for ventilation where appropriate, and give the room a clear relation to the city or courtyard.

If it does only one of these things, it may still pass. But it has failed the home.

Lower ceilings: the hidden compression of modern housing

The second difference is ceiling height.

Modern apartments often have lower ceilings than older urban apartments. In many jurisdictions, minimum heights are surprisingly modest. The English nationally described space standard, for example, requires at least 2.3 metres floor-to-ceiling height for at least 75 percent of the gross internal area; it also includes minimum floor areas, bedroom widths and storage requirements as part of a broader dwelling standard rather than isolated numbers.

Again, that is a minimum. It is not a theory of good living.

Ceiling height matters because it changes the entire physiology of a room. It affects daylight penetration, air volume, acoustic character, perceived spaciousness, furniture proportion and the emotional register of the home. A room with high ceilings can tolerate smaller floor area because vertical volume gives psychological relief. A room with low ceilings and limited daylight must be larger or more carefully planned to avoid compression.

Older Art Nouveau and Art Deco apartments often had ceiling heights around 2.8 to 3.3 metres, sometimes more in principal rooms. This was not merely extravagance. High ceilings helped with daylight before artificial lighting was cheap and ubiquitous. They helped air stratify before modern ventilation. They allowed tall windows. They gave formal hierarchy to rooms: entrance, salon, dining room, bedroom, service spaces. Even when the social assumptions behind those plans no longer fit, the spatial generosity remains valuable.

Modern construction pushes in the other direction. Lower floor-to-floor heights reduce façade area, structural cost, stair and lift height, material quantities, heating volume and total building height. Where planning limits fix the maximum height, shaving ceiling heights may allow an extra storey. There it is, the little devil again, tapping the spreadsheet with a tiny fork.

One extra floor can transform a project's economics. A few centimetres multiplied across floors become saleable area. And because ceiling height is less visible in a plan than floor area, it is easier to compress without immediate resistance. Buyers notice square metres first; their bodies notice height later.

This is one of the central mechanisms by which quality declines. The market sells area but people live in volume.

A policy response does not need to require palatial ceilings everywhere. But it should recognize ceiling height as a quality dimension, especially in small dwellings. A 35 m² apartment with 2.7 metres under the ceiling is not the same dwelling as a 35 m² apartment with 2.3 metres. A compact home needs more height, not less, because the vertical dimension compensates for limited plan area.

The good urban apartment should be measured in cubic dignity, not just square metres.

Tighter hallways and common areas: the shrinking of the social threshold

The third loss is shared space: corridors, stairwells, entrances, lobbies, galleries, laundry rooms, bicycle rooms, courtyards and the awkward but important in-between spaces where private life becomes city life.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco apartment buildings often gave these spaces more architectural attention. The entrance hall was a threshold, sometimes modest, sometimes theatrical. Stairs had daylight. Landings had width. Corridors were not merely tubes to doors. Materials were durable: terrazzo, tile, stone, hardwood, plaster, iron. Even economical buildings often understood that the way home mattered.

Modern buildings frequently treat common areas as cost centres. Every square metre of corridor is non-saleable. Every wider stair eats into efficiency. Every generous lobby competes with private units. Every common room must be justified against the sharp little gods of yield.

Regulation prevents the worst outcomes. TEK17, for instance, requires corridors and gallery access routes to accessible dwelling units to have a free width of at least 1.5 metres, with some short sections permitted at 1.2 metres, and long corridors must allow two wheelchairs to pass. This is important. It is also revealing: if regulation did not protect these widths, market pressure would often shrink them further.

But width alone does not make shared space good. A corridor can be wide enough for compliance and still miserable: long, windowless, acoustically harsh, artificially lit, smelling faintly of takeaway and resignation. A lobby can be accessible and still feel like a service entrance. A stair can be safe and still discourage use. A bicycle room can exist and still be so badly located that residents treat it like a punishment cave for wheels.

Older buildings often had an advantage because the common route was also part of the building's identity. The stairwell was not merely circulation; it was architecture. The entrance did not merely open the building; it performed arrival. This mattered socially. People pause in decent thresholds. They recognize neighbors. They feel ownership. Bad common areas produce residential anonymity of the worst sort: not urban freedom, but mutual avoidance under LED strips.

The common area is where housing quality stops being private. It is the social hinge of the apartment building.

The role of regulation: necessary, but too easily captured by minimum logic

It would be easy to blame regulation for everything. That would be convenient and mostly wrong.

Modern building standards have improved life in crucial ways. Fire safety, accessibility, structural reliability, energy performance, moisture control and indoor air quality are not bureaucratic luxuries. They are civilization, written in clauses. The World Health Organization's housing and health guidelines stress that housing conditions affect respiratory and cardiovascular health, infectious disease exposure, stress, injury, temperature-related mortality and more. Housing is public health with walls.

The problem is not that standards exist. The problem is that standards tend to define minimum acceptable performance, while the market tends to build as close to minimum as it can when land values are high and buyers lack transparent information about long-term livability.

This is a category error. Minimum standards are designed to prevent harm. They are not designed to define excellence. When they become the de facto design target, quality collapses downward toward legality.

The result is a kind of regulatory uncanny valley. New apartments are not bad enough to be illegal, but not generous enough to be good. They are safe, warm and compliant — and still faintly hostile to daily life.

This is especially dangerous because contemporary buildings often compensate for spatial reduction with technical systems. Mechanical ventilation compensates for sealed façades. Artificial lighting compensates for weaker daylight. Lifts compensate for tighter stairs. Digital access systems compensate for poor thresholds. Energy modelling compensates for smaller windows. None of these tools is bad. Many are necessary. But when technical systems become substitutes for spatial intelligence, housing quality becomes fragile. A power outage, a poorly maintained ventilation system, a dark winter, a work-from-home day, a child with a fever, an elderly parent visiting — ordinary life quickly reveals what the plan concealed.

Why Art Nouveau and Art Deco still feel good

Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings often feel good because they combine three things contemporary housing too often separates: urban density, spatial generosity and architectural attention.

They are dense but not necessarily tall. They make streets, not isolated objects. They often use perimeter-block logic, with apartments facing both street and courtyard. They give rooms enough height to breathe. They use window proportions that connect interior and exterior. They understand the entrance as a ritual. They give the stair dignity. They make everyday movement legible.

This is not about decoration. A floral iron railing does not make a bad apartment good. A zigzag Art Deco motif does not improve a windowless corridor by magic. Ornament is the visible foam on deeper urban milk. The real qualities are section, plan, proportion, threshold and material durability.

These buildings also remind us that beauty can support maintenance. People care for buildings that feel worth caring for. Durable materials invite repair. Generous stairs invite use. Daylit corridors reduce resentment. Good proportions age better than fashionable finishes. A building with spatial dignity can survive changes in taste; a building dependent on surface styling becomes tired as soon as the render goes out of fashion.

Modern architecture should not imitate Art Nouveau or Art Deco. It should learn from them.

The lesson is not lilies and sunbursts. The lesson is: light before branding, volume before styling, thresholds before sales graphics, shared dignity before private optimization.

Environmental standards and the window trap

There is one uncomfortable point that must be handled honestly. Some features of older buildings that people love — high ceilings, large windows, thick masonry — can conflict with energy goals if copied crudely. Heating more air costs energy. Large windows can lose heat in winter and create overheating in summer. Historic façades can be hard to retrofit. Poorly planned natural ventilation can mean noise, pollution or heat stress.

But this does not prove that lower-quality apartments are environmentally virtuous. It proves that design is difficult. Little goblin conclusion avoided.

A good contemporary apartment can have excellent energy performance and high living quality. It can use high-performance glazing, external shading, careful orientation, compact thermal bridges, heat recovery ventilation, smart daylight design, moderate but meaningful ceiling heights, and generous common areas. It can be dense without being mean. It can be low-carbon without feeling like a padded envelope.

The embodied-carbon debate also changes the picture. Demolishing older buildings and replacing them with efficient but spatially inferior new ones may produce significant upfront emissions. LETI's retrofit guidance emphasizes deep reductions in energy use through whole-house retrofit approaches, and broader climate design frameworks increasingly stress whole-life carbon rather than operational energy alone. If an older building has good bones — height, light, structure, adaptable rooms — retrofit may preserve both carbon and quality.

The future should not be old versus new. It should be good bones plus modern performance.

The three losses in one sentence

Smaller windows reduce the apartment's relationship to the day.

Lower ceilings reduce its internal generosity and daylight capacity.

Tighter hallways and common areas reduce the building's social life.

Together, these losses transform the apartment from home into unit. Not always, not everywhere, but often enough to define a pattern. The building becomes efficient in the narrow sense and inefficient in the human sense. It saves centimetres and spends well-being.

The tragedy is that these qualities are easiest to remove before anyone lives there. On paper, the difference between a 2.35 m ceiling and a 2.7 m ceiling is a number. Between a corridor with borrowed daylight and a sealed corridor is a line. Between a generous window and a mean one is a façade ratio. Between a real entrance and a compressed lobby is a rentable area calculation.

Only later do these become mood, health, habit, neighborliness and the subtle daily feeling of whether one's home is generous or stingy.

What modern standards should learn

Modern housing standards need to move beyond isolated minimums toward combined quality tests. A dwelling should not be assessed only by whether each individual requirement passes. It should be assessed by how the qualities interact.

A small apartment should need stronger compensating qualities: more ceiling height, better daylight, excellent storage, better shared rooms, and access to usable outdoor space.

A single-aspect apartment should face stricter tests for depth, overheating, ventilation and daylight.

A low-ceiling apartment should not also be deep, narrow and poorly lit.

A building with compact private units should provide genuinely useful common areas: work rooms, guest rooms, laundry, workshops, roof terraces, gardens, bicycle rooms and storage.

A corridor should be judged not only by width but by daylight, length, acoustic comfort, wayfinding and social safety.

A window should be judged not only by area but by position, sky view, opening, shading, privacy and relation to furniture.

This is not overregulation. It is systems thinking. Housing quality is not a pile of separate checkboxes. It is an ecology.

A practical design manifesto for urban apartments

Here is the blunt version.

Do not make the main room depend on one mean window at the end of a deep plan.

Do not call a room a bedroom if it cannot hold a bed, storage and movement without domestic Tetris.

Do not lower ceilings in small apartments and then pretend square metres tell the whole truth.

Do not design corridors as windowless pipes unless there is truly no alternative.

Do not treat shared space as wasted space. It is where the building becomes a community rather than a filing cabinet for private mortgages.

Do not use energy performance as an excuse for poor daylight. Use better windows, better shading and better modelling.

Do not demolish buildings with good bones just because their technical systems are old. Retrofit is often the more intelligent act.

Do not confuse compliance with quality. Compliance is the beginning of responsibility, not its completion.

The future: not nostalgia, but a better minimum

The answer is not to recreate 1905, or 1928, or any other year with better staircases and worse antibiotics. The answer is to create a new standard of urban apartment housing that combines modern performance with older spatial intelligence.

The Art Nouveau apartment teaches daylight, threshold and craft.

The Art Deco apartment teaches rhythm, lobby dignity and urban confidence.

The best post-war housing teaches sunlight, landscape and social planning.

The best contemporary building science teaches energy, accessibility, acoustics and carbon.

The tragedy is that we often choose among these inheritances instead of combining them.

A humane future apartment building should be warm, low-carbon, accessible and safe. But it should also have rooms with height, windows with purpose, corridors with dignity, common areas with life, and plans generous enough to absorb change. People age. Children arrive. Work moves home. Bodies fail temporarily or permanently. Friendships need places to happen. A good building knows this in advance.

The minimum standard should protect us from danger. It should never become the ambition.

Because when the minimum becomes the home, the city has not solved its housing problem. It has merely made the problem compliant.