The shared flat

The manuals were written for a household, which meant a family under one head with one stove and one altar, and a flat of three adults who found each other on a website is not that. It is, though, a thing the tradition knew well by another name: the compound divided, the courtyard house of one family become the home of several, which Beijing called the dazayuan, the big mixed courtyard, and which the households in it read with the ordinary rules, a house per wing and the court for the street. This guide gives that reading for a shared flat: each room set as a house is set, with its bed, its desk and its door; the kitchen and the living room kept as the hall the rooms share, with a place in it for everyone; what the crowding and privacy research says the plan is for; and the two rules, one about doors and one about the table, that keep a house-share from turning into a corridor of strangers.

The compound divided

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The courtyard house the houses essay draws was built for a family, the hall on the axis for the elders and the ancestors, the wings for the sons and their wives, one gate, one stove, and a court kept open because the court was the household’s bright hall and the thing the plan was for. The twentieth century divided most of them. Knapp’s surveys of the old cities record what happened to the siheyuan of Beijing after 1949 and in the housing shortages that followed: a household in each wing and two in the hall, a stove at every door, lean-tos across the court for the kitchens and the coal, and the gate the one thing still shared, a pattern the city called the big mixed courtyard and that the households in it read, without a manual, as the tradition reads any house. Each wing had a door of its own that closed, a stove of its own with its own kitchen god above it, a bed against its own solid wall with the door in view, and a share of the court that had once been the axis and was now the street that everyone opened onto. What the divided compound lost was not luck but the court, which the lean-tos took, and the households that fared best in Knapp’s accounts were the ones that kept a strip of it clear and a bench in it. The shared flat is the dazayuan with the court roofed and the lean-tos taken away, a house per room and a hall that is nobody’s and everybody’s, and its plan is the compound’s lesson: keep the hall.

Three houses and a hall

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1. 1Each room a house: the bed with its head to the solid wall, the door seen from the pillow
2. 2The desk at the window, light from the side, the back to a wall
3. 3Each door a front door: a solid leaf, a lock, nothing stored against it inside
4. 4The kitchen and the table the hall: a seat for each with a wall behind, the door seen from the head
5. 5The bathroom door not onto the table · 6 The corridor lit and kept clear, the flat’s one street

The plan above reads a flat of three bedrooms as three houses and a hall, which is the compound’s reading with the court roofed, and everything in it is a rule the site already has, applied at a different scale. Each room is set as a house is set. The bed goes with its head to the room’s one solid wall and the door in view from the pillow, which is the bed placement guide’s command position and matters more in a house-share than in a family, since the door of a rented room opens onto people who are not kin. The desk goes at the window with the light from the side and a wall behind the chair, the desk placement guide’s rule, and in a room that is also the tenant’s study, sitting room and store it is the one piece whose position is not negotiable. The door of each room is treated as a front door: a solid leaf that closes and locks, nothing stored against it inside, a hook and a light beside it, and the doors inside guide’s rule that two room doors should not face each other across the corridor, which the neighbours guide gives for a block and which applies, with the same remedies, to a landing. The kitchen and the table are the hall. The table has a seat for each of the three with a wall behind it, the head of the table sees the door, and the bathroom’s door does not open onto it; the sofa, if there is one, has a place for each too, since a living room with two seats in a flat of three is a room somebody stands in. The corridor is the flat’s one street, and it is lit and kept clear, since it is the line every door opens onto and the route every sleeper takes to the bathroom at night. Nothing in the plan needs the three to agree about feng shui. It needs them to agree that the kitchen is shared and the rooms are not, which is the compound’s rule and the one the tenancy already implies.

The door and the table

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1. 1Each room’s door is a front door: it locks, and it is closed when the tenant is out or asleep
2. 2Each bed with a wall behind it and its own door in view: the command position, three times
3. 3The shared table, with a chair for every tenant and a wall behind each
4. 4The head of the table sees the door, as the hall’s head seat did
5. 5The ghosted failure: two stools for three, so the third tenant eats standing or in their room
6. 6The table cleared after each use; the kitchen unattended more than a family’s, so an alarm at the door

The two rules the site takes from the compound are about the door and the table, and they are the ones a house-share most often breaks. The door first. A room in a shared flat is a house, and its door is a front door, which means it is closed when the tenant is out and closed when the tenant is asleep, and it is not opened by anyone else; the tradition’s doors between the wings of a compound were exactly this, and the doors inside guide’s reading of a door as a mouth applies to each. The research reads it the same way from the other side. Evans’s review of housing and mental health finds crowding, measured not by people per room but by the sense of being unable to withdraw, among the built environment’s steadiest effects, and finds that a lockable room of one’s own removes most of the effect at any density; Gifford’s review of towers finds the residents who cope best with neighbours to be the ones with a door that is theirs. A tenant with a room that closes and a bed with a wall behind it has the privacy the research measures and the command the tradition asks for, and they are the same thing. The table second. A shared hall is a hall only if everyone in the house has a place in it, and a kitchen with two stools for three tenants, or a sofa that seats one household’s guests and not the others, is a hall that has become one household’s wing. The tradition’s hall seated the whole family by rank and the site keeps the seats and drops the rank: a chair for each, a wall behind each, the door in view from the head, and the table cleared after each use, since Saxbe and Repetti’s cluttered kitchens were the ones whose households described their homes as a burden. A house-share that keeps the doors closed and the table open has the compound’s plan, and the compound’s plan was the tradition’s only plan for strangers under one roof.

The shared flat, in order

1. Each room a house. Bed to the solid wall with the door in view, the desk at the window with a wall behind, a wardrobe that closes.
2. Each door a front door. A solid leaf, a lock, nothing stored against it, closed when out and when asleep, opened by no one else.
3. Doors not facing. Where two room doors face across a landing, a curtain inside, a plain leaf and a light, as for neighbours.
4. The kitchen the hall. A seat for each with a wall behind, the head of the table seeing the door, the table cleared after use.
5. The corridor the street. Lit at night, kept clear, a runner on the floor, soft closers on the doors.
6. The alarms. Heat in the kitchen, smoke in the corridor, the bedroom doors closed at night; a house of three schedules is a kitchen unattended.
7. The compass, by room. Each tenant’s kua for their own bed if they want it; the flat’s facing left to the landlord.