H3llR4iser wrote: » Well, it's not really rocket science - in the same report, it emerges Ireland has both the highest number of "under-occupied" dwelling, and the highest percentage of people living in houses as opposed to apartments; It's not complicated to see the two things are tightly related. As a continental European who grew up in an apartment and never ever lived in a house, however, I have to bring a slightly different angle to this - the premises of the study might be a bit too generic and skewing the result more than a bit. I currently live alone in a two-bedroom apartment, so I am technically a perfect study case for the statistic; Even if I had a partner, we'd still be "under occupying" as there'd be a spare bedroom. The reality is way different - I find the place TOO SMALL; The bedrooms are barely larger than the beds, there's only one small 3-doors wardrobe, the only form of "storage" is one single shelf in the hot press. I had to get a small "Billy" bookcase from IKEA to store, well, books - it's 80cm wide and to put it in the living room I had to play a game of Tetris with the rest of the furniture (one table, four chairs, one coffee table and a couch). And...this is by far the best apartment I've lived in here in Ireland. In a nutshell, dwellings here are often designed as if the occupiers will be a couple of cartoon characters, owning one outfit they wear every single day and with no interest in life other than sleeping, watching TV and working. Houses are often no better - I've been in plenty that, while they have a large surface area in absolute terms, are divided in a labyrinthic nightmare of tiny, almost unusable rooms, each barely able to contain a double bed. Over most continental EU, with the odd exception of the "shoebox" ones, apartments are usually designed to accommodate a family - the rooms are larger, there is thought given to storage even in rooms where you'd think you need none (big "entertainment cupboards" covering an entire wall offering a TV mount, places for books, display cases and objects of various kinds are common); as a result, you'd often have numerically less rooms, but bigger and more "up to the task" when it comes to comfortably host a family. It does make sense that people here go for places that have more rooms than they need, just to claim the space and storage from those, while in most of Europe, the same space will usually come in a less "fragmented" format, with less rooms.
