I’d never seen a built-in electric dish dryer before I came to Taiwan, and they feel like a really cool luxury. (Somehow, their novelty makes them feel more luxurious to me than a more familiar, and possibly more useful, dishwasher.) Likewise, as someone who prefers to hang-dry laundry, ubiquitous laundry balconies were a cool surprise.
What features or qualities of your apartment or apartment building do you like that are hard to find or unknown back where you’re from?
Anything goes, from design, to layout, to decor, to appliances, to furnishings, or whatever else you particularly value about your place and personally associate with Taiwan.
Those dish dryer is useful for dish storage, but I have no idea why dishwasher is so hard to find here, and if you do find them they are extremely expensive.
Same with clothes dryer, they’re more useful here because hanging laundry takes up space, and space is in short supply here.
I’d also never seen an electric dish dryer before going to Taiwan, but I’ve never actually used it because it seems like such a pointless extravogence. I mean, you leave your dishes to dry after you wash them and it takes a couple of hours, why does anybody need to speed up the process?
I think dish dryers were just a passing fashion, no? I saw quite a lot of them 15-20 years ago, but they were so obviously pointless that people stopped buying them.
The thing I like most about Taiwanese apartments is the ‘wet bathroom’, particularly the version where the shower is literally just a showerhead suspended above a tiled floor. This was a revelation to me, coming from a country where bathrooms are almost universally carpeted (for a good reason, it should be said). The ‘bum gun’ also was one of those Sudden Clarity moments for me.
Nope. Common in the UK for a bathroom to have actual wall-to-wall carpet. Or at least it was. It became less common for a while as heating became cheaper, but I bet it’s going to become fashionable again with 50p/kWh electricity.
Like I said, coming to Taiwan was a bit of an eye-opener. It’s funny how you don’t question stuff until you see how other people do it differently.
My first thought, when I saw the title of this thread, is that this certainly must be a joke, right?
If I got this right, then here are my takes!
A water machine, as the water in Taiwan is non-potable!
An official number of ping that far exceeds what the actual unit offers!
A possible landlord who, as part of the propertied class, has every right to deny providing receipts for rent payments, as that would infringe on his or her rights!
If I can think of more, I’ll post them later. In the meantime, thanks for this unique Sunday afternoon laugh!
Simplicity in design, construction, and maintenance (including cleaning, of course). It gets the job done with the minimum of hardware and clutter.
While it’s possible to frame this as an instance of big bad capitalists taking advantage - with some validity - I’ve come around to the Taiwanese way of doing things in this regard compared to the nightmarish regulatory situation for landlords in (say) the UK, which benefits absolutely nobody. The Taiwanese landlord’s propensity for tax evasion and hands-off management style is, IMO, one reason that rents are absurdly low relative to income and tenant-landlord relationships are somewhat less fraught than they might otherwise be.
For reference, I come from the US. I’ve been racking my brain but can’t come up with any unique benefits. Apartments in my area are certainly cheaper than back in California, so there’s that.
EDIT: Ok here’s one. In Taiwan I don’t have to worry about packages that are left at the door being stolen. Porch piracy is a big thing in the States. I guess that’s more of a cultural thing than due to apartment design.
Mine has literally never been used, by myself or the previous 2 tenants. The electrical outlet where the plug is sutting still has plastic on it. My collects random kitchen stuff that is rarely used
Yeah, things like wet bathrooms and bum guns I’ve already seen in other countries. The dish dryer is unique to Taiwan but also kinda pointless.
There is Japanese style floor storage in my spare room here, which is useful but I don’t have a ton of stuff in there. Not really unique to or even common in Taiwan, though
I suppose it is offset by the charming jail like bars on windows on some residential buildings—a leftover of the bad old days when break-ins and property theft were much more common.
