Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Twelve houses to the acre
Build no more than about twelve houses to the acre, in groups rather than endless rows, each with a front garden and a long back garden; the saving on roads pays for the extra land.
≈ 12 houses per net acre (≈ 30 per hectare), against 40 or more in by-law streets
Unwin compared two layouts of the same field. The by-law layout crams in parallel terraces and spends much of its land on roads; the garden layout places fewer houses round the edges of a larger block, with gardens and an inner green, and needs far less road. Counting roads, drains and land together, he showed, the garden house costs its tenant little more, and gives light, air and a garden.
With Barry Parker he built the houses to match: cottages in groups of three to six under one long tiled roof, roughcast or brick, with gables, tall chimneys, wide casement windows and the living room on the sunny side. Twelve to the acre became the standard of British council housing after 1919.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.
Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Twelve houses to the acre”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/unwin-twelve-to-acre. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.