The Spare Door: Designing a Room for Its Second Use

Draw the second entrance

Picture a dining room in a small guesthouse. The breakfast tables are stacked away and someone wants to give a language class there in the evening. Try drawing the route from the street to the first chair. Does a visitor have to walk through the kitchen? Who has the key to the lavatory? Now put one more door on the drawing and try the walk again. This imagined room is a useful way to discuss adaptability because a pencil mark has consequences that can be traced right through a plan.

There is a temptation to call any generous room flexible. A handsome rectangle may still belong entirely to the person who controls the front desk. In this exercise the second entrance earns its place only if a teacher could arrive, open up and finish the evening without taking possession of the rest of the building.

Look past the spare square metres

Draw the furniture twice at the same scale. In the first drawing, leave the breakfast tables where a guest might pull out a chair to reach the window. In the second, leave a clear route for someone arriving late to the class. The interesting part is where pencil lines collide. A shelf that looks incidental in the first drawing might take up precisely the patch of wall needed to store the folded tables in the second.

Then look at the room in section. Where would daylight reach the person reading at the back? Could an evening visitor find the exit when the rest of the guesthouse is dark? Tracing these experiences gives a designer something specific to discuss with an operator before making any promise about future uses.

Give the envelope its own drawing

Energy renovation introduces a different set of questions. The European Commission identifies windows, insulation and building systems among the factors that determine a building’s energy performance. Its overview of the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive explains how renovation passports can guide work in stages. Those are useful prompts for the guesthouse exercise. They establish no particular performance rating for the imagined room.

Take the new door as a detail. On a separate sheet, draw the existing wall and mark what would need to come out to form the opening. Leave space for someone else to annotate it. A designer might want more light, an operator a robust threshold and a future occupant some privacy. Putting those requests beside the same piece of wall makes their differences much easier to see.

What to carry into the next brief

Before putting a value on spare space, give it a plausible second occupant and ask how that person would use it on an ordinary Tuesday. Keep both versions of the plan. Even if the evening class never takes place, the marked-up drawings explain which decisions a future project team could reconsider and which would involve opening the fabric again.

Sources and method

The guesthouse and its occupants are fictional. The design exercise is editorial interpretation. The European Commission’s overview of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive supplies the background on energy renovation and renovation passports.