There’s a new luxury building going up in my neighborhood (actually, a few). I took a look at the floor plans and many of the layouts have a “bedroom” without an outside wall window.
The circled room has a window looking into the bathroom, as far as I can tell.
I put bedroom in quotes above because I assume that a proper bedroom without outside window access is illegal, at least in my American mind.
The description is 3房2廳2衛. Would a non-windowed bedroom be allowed because these rooms are referred to as 房–which is used as ‘bedroom’ practically speaking but could be simply ‘room’–as opposed to the more specific 臥房?
Or, perhaps it is totally legal to call a room like that a bedroom? I’m just curious.
If that drawing is to scale the apartment is tiny, the entire area with the TV/coffee table and sofa is barely larger than the double bed! Going to be very cosy if all the occupants of this three bedroom apartment want to watch TV at the same time!
Yeah every so called bedroom is directly connected to the living room. Wouldn’t be my cup of tea.
When I was viewing apartments it was very common to for 3 to be 2 or 4 to be 3, they would claims closets as bedrooms, or in the worse cases an alcove!
Or they will inflate the floor space by adding the area the hallway outside the apartment to the floor space. Also if it’s a building yet to be built, there’s the risk the developer could just do a half ass job and abscond with the money.
That was actually what the real estate crisis in China was about. With property price going down it caused a lot of construction companies to simply fold before building is even complete.
Bedrooms without windows are for the SEA caregivers. And those are the lucky ones that got a “bedroom” for themselves.
Apparently the market here doesn’t care about the size of each room*, just the number of them. Our apartment would be much better as a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom layout instead of the 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom it has. The room where I am right now writing this would barely fit a 90 cm wide bed and a wardrobe
I really don’t understand why the master bedroom must always have an exclusive bathroom even in the tiniest of the 2 room apartments.
*Except for the kitchen, then they care about the size: it must be as tiny as possible.
I noticed this in Seattle when I moved there back in 2015. A lot of newer apartment buildings had the bedroom in the middle of the apartment so there was no window. After a while I realized two big reasons:
Noise. Self-explanatory.
Ridiculously early sunrises. Taiwan is absolutely on the wrong time zone. It starts getting bright at 5 am! Having an interior bedroom means you don’t need to deal with the sun and its nonsense.
My partner has a very small apartment with a bedroom without window. The other rooms with windows face another building 2-3 meters away. You look straight in the living room and kitchen of another apartment. I have spent a lot of time there. Although l would never buy an apartment like that, it’s not that bad. You get used to a lot of things. My own place is facing west, super flooded with sunshine. Love it.
I think around 5 a.m. at the earliest, at least for Taipei and with the exception of a couple of weeks in the summer when it really is closer to 4:30 a.m. I’m often awake at that time, and it’s hardly ever/basically never light as early as 4:30 a.m.
