Welcome to Room Below

Britain has the unenviable record of building the smallest houses in Europe. Many developers and builders find that space constraints or Planning requirements prevent them from adding to the footprint or the overall height of the home they would like to build. The obvious solution is to build a basement. Basements, either for new build or retro-fit, are the new must have item to have. An aspirational choice to rank alongside hardwood floors, underfloor heating and designer kitchens.
 
There have been periods in our history when basement building has been commonplace. You only have to visit many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century intercity areas to see plenty of examples of homes built with basements. However, with the coming of the railways and the opening up of suburbs in countryside to house building, building land became cheap and plentiful and the basement fell out of fashion.
 
In other countries basements have prospered. In the USA, Canada, mainland Europe and Germany in particular, homes are regularly constructed with basements. While in Britain the number of basements being built per year is measured in hundreds, in Germany the figure is thousands. The renaissance of the British basement seems to be coming about as a result of high land prices, a need to maximum the available floor area and new and more simple ways of basement construction. Most every new home in Britain has for the past forty years had a garage, yet increasingly we use garages for storage and park cars outside. The penny seems to have finally dropped and we at last realise that the typical family home is built with far too little storage space and that adding a basement is an entirely sensible and reasonable response.
 
The bonus for developers and builders is that the added cost of building a basement is largely offset by not having to construct a foundation, piled or otherwise.
 
Amended and reproduced by kind permission of The Basement Development Group.

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