You’ll probably want about 1/2-3/4 acres in which to build your family’s home and have some ground to work.

You can put the hosue at the rear of your property.

Most apartments I’ve lived in (2 people and a dog) fall into the 500-1000 sqft range. I’d say 1500-2000 is plenty big for all but the largest families. If you’re optimizing for space, I’d say start with a baseline of around 500 then add 250 per person?

Conversion: 1000sqft = 93sqm

As a single person, my 480ft²/45m² studio apartments is basically the exact space I need.

I think as a single person a LK studio setup is good. Married might bump it up to 1LK. Every kid after can add a bedroom and and the dining area, so one kid 2LDK, two kids 3LDK. Bathrooms is a different story depending on where you live.

I think it greatly depends on how big the family is. If someone has six kids, they need rooms for those kids, and that would be too much for people with two or fewer kids. Even if you take away the dumb “girls need their own private locking space with two doors between them and any male in the house” rules.

Going to the other extreme, I’ve heard of prisons shut down and renovated as affordable housing. I think if you were going to make prison cells into housing for free people though, you would have to give those people control of the doors, and while I suppose a prison probably has a centralised location to cook for the entire population, you would probably want more local cooking on each housing unit, if it’s a big one with more than one. And the doors would be opened by the residents, I’m thinking with RFID or NFC cards. You can run power to each room through the water closets, i.e. where the plumbing goes. But none of these would be good for families, only singles. This would be a better solution for homeless people who don’t have anyone, and possibly for those who need help, as you could have social services, mental health type people go there instead of guards, to care for the people and their needs. Yes, almost like an insane asylum, but you give the residents full agency. No lockdowns or anything like that. Just people with basic living conditions being helped as needed, with conditions that are livable but would make anyone want to seek something better outside, anything, even if it’s just a single-wide trailer in tornado alley, just for the room and the space.

My house is 90m², though the upstairs has a low ceiling and mostly just functions as a bedroom, so it’s more like 60m² in practice. While I wouldn’t want to raise a family here, I still find it perfectly sufficient for two people. It also comes with the additional benefits of having fewer rooms to heat, clean, and renovate. I also like that my yard feels a lot bigger due to the smaller footprint of the house itself.

That being said, I would prefer it to be slightly bigger. Maybe one extra room and a bigger-than-1.5m x 1.5m bathroom.

I think there’s reasonable high and low bounds as you say, but i think there’s a lot of factors as others have said. Income, culture, and cost of living are big factors. If you live in the USA and basically need to do a weekly shop at Costco for a family of 4 you need a lot more space than a single person who is able to eat out for nearly every meal in a dense urban area with affordable and moderately healthy street food (so a tiny hot plate suffices as a kitchen). But a family of 4 living in an urban area with lots of shops might do the groceries on the way home from work several times a week and then the refrigerator doesn’t need to be enormous.

Lifestyle plays into it as well. If you have a serious hobby you need space for it - whether it’s sewing, machining, fitness, or gaming. If you live on a rural property, you need space to keep chickens and a lawn tractor and a lot more necessities than someone in a flat in London.

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It’s been my experience that the areas most often referred to as “bad parts of town” are the areas with the most people squeezed in without consideration for anything else. Small homes can be fine of there are other outlets in the area such as community centers, parks, libraries, stores, etc. Without those you just concentrate too much human suffering in one area.

Hugely subjective and you’re right on cultural differences coming into play, as well as access to/existence of common areas. Are bathrooms communal? Are patios/balconies/outdoor spaces? Are there areas to congregate/socialize/eat nearby? This affects how much internal space is needed.

It becomes more of an urban planning, zoning, and building code exercise than one to be solved by developers, who will try to maximize revenue on any given plot when given the chance. The problem for developers (and accessible housing) is margin: unless gov heavily subsidizes low end residential, they will prefer to build more lucrative luxury apartments.

For contentedness, area per occupant would be the best bet. I’d expect an attempt to target median family sizes and working from there. Global household average is around 3.5 people.

Somewhere in the 20-55 square meter range per occupant is likely the sweet spot, depending on the above factors. You can get away with less space with more amenities nearby.

Mexico has “mini-casas” of ~325 square feet to provide housing for their working poor which residents had challenges with. Paris and Hong Kong have tiny apartments around 10 square meters, where residents spend a significant amount of time outside the home. But these were developer limitations, mostly, to cram as many units into a footprint as possible - not taking occupant satisfaction into account…

When we had 6 kids living with us, 2500 sq feet felt luxurious. Two kids in each bedroom upstairs, and we had a bedroom downstairs, there were 6 bathrooms in that house (5 full one just a toilet and sink) and it did feel big.

When we had 4 kids in a 1300 sq foot house, it was plenty enough room but there was only one bathroom and that made it more difficult.

We had 2 in a 1300 with 2 bathrooms AND a garage for storage and workout room, that worked fine, but the bedrooms were big and living room tiny, that is not ideal, it needed to be arranged differently.

Now we have 2 kids in an 1800 sq feet house and I would say this is ideal, it’s arranged so the kids have their own living room/gaming room outside of their small bedrooms, and we have a bedroom on the other side of the house where the kitchen and main living room are. Also a great big back deck that can be accessed from our bedroom and that main living room, which adds enough capacity we can have big parties. 2.5 bathrooms, 3.5 would be better. When these last 2 kids move out it will STILL be ideal, an office, a guest room or workout room, a den, we could even move the TV out of the living room then if we wanted.

So I think how it’s arranged makes a difference but family of 4 in 1800sq ft feels like we have a big house to me.

I need 2800 ish for 2 people. I do a lot of shit.

My wife and I bought our first house before we had kids. It was ~1000sqft, 3 beds 1 bath and perfect for just us. Granted we had 2 dogs and 5 cats so it felt hectic at times, but with a nice little back yard the dogs we’re much more calm.

After having 2 kids it started feeling cramped, 100% doable, but as someone who works from home I was dying for more space. The layout was also awful, it seemed like one of the previous owners tried to make it “open concept” and didn’t think it through, so there was nowhere you could go to get an ounce of privacy aside from the bedrooms which were 8x8 all around.

We recently moved to a 1900sqft house and its absolutely great. I can take work calls while everyone’s yelling in the living room and its not a bother. My toddler can play whole the baby’s napping without waking him up. The bedrooms are big with honestly huge closets. Before I was sharing a closet with my toddler and mostly living out of hampers, now he has a closet that his bed could fit in.

My only desire is am extra to for guest if anyone needed to stay with us for a while. I’m hoping to fix up the basement soon and make it a nice 900sqft guest house type thing.

I think we have more space than we necessarily need now, but that makes me happy.

I actually calculated this a while ago. I’m not going by just “essentials” but also taking in account that furniture will take up space. So you need just enough to not feel ‘cramped’, and to be comfortable.

In this one, I have a somewhat rectangular-shaped home in mind. Assume you need at least the following:

• Bedroom: (bed + cabinet for clothes): 8 m₂

• Dinner area (table and chairs) 10 m₂

• Toilet and washing basin 2 m₂

• Shower (including rack) 4 m₂

• Kitchen (storage, sink, oven, hot plate, fridge, dishwasher, washing machine/washdryer/dryer, rubbish bin) 8 m₂

• Living (couch, TV or whatever) 8 m₂

• Extra space[1] (your niche) 8 m₂

• Hallway (clothing rack, room access) 6 m₂

• Optional [2] (outdoor) 10 m₂

[1] You could also distribute the extra space to the other rooms. Just consider it a sort of ‘backup’. You could even distribute all the above around freely if you wanted so. Maybe you want a smaller dinner area but more of that garden, or bath.

[2] For this I count a garage, garden, or bicycle storage. But I consider it optional since not everyone has or strictly needs those for good comfort. (Some places have a collective garden instead, like a hof, or are very forested, and have communal storage places).

If you were especially efficient with the space, eg. having small tables and beds, merging living+dinner room, toilet and bathroom together, I suppose you could cram it down to 40 m₂. But that’s gonna feel cramped a bit easily, unless if you’re a student or live at a retirement home.

Altogether, you then get about 54-64 m₂ for an household of 1-2 adults (may include a small child or pet).

So a good fist rule might be 60 m₂, then add 20 m₂ for each extra person. Mostly due to additional bedrooms, storage usage, maybe an extra bathroom, larger garden, etc. So then you have:

1-2 people: 60 m₂
3 people: 80 m₂
4 people: 100 m₂
5 people: 120 m₂
and so on.

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