“The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.” – Louis Kahn

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Low ceilings tend to create a more cosy and intimate feeling whereas tall ceilings promote grandeur and luxury. However, if not designed well, low ceilings can leave a room feeling cramped and tall ceilings can make a room feel cold. Both have their place and often we don’t have a choice in terms of the height of the ceiling in our homes and offices.

In this report, Secret Agent discusses some of the indirect implications ceiling heights have on our daily lives.

Access the Ceiling Height report now!

We have just released our latest Secret Agent report!

“There is now around one occupied apartment for every five occupied separate houses in Australia – compared with one to every seven, back in 1991.” (ABS, 2017)

Apartments are increasingly popular living options for owner occupiers and tenants alike. They are located in some of the best positions, close to schools, transport, work and lifestyle precincts. They are well suited to a variety of audiences, from young professionals entering the property market to retirees looking to downsize, to office workers who want to cut down on transport time, to students who want to reside close to university.

In this report, Secret Agent will take a look at the state of the apartment market in Melbourne and Australia in general.

Access the State of Apartments report now!

We have just released our latest Secret Agent report!

This month, Secret Agent takes a closer look at the co-living spaces that are emerging across the world. While this trend is something we have seen before, it has re-emerged in a modern form and is changing the way people think about living – and working.

Access the Co-Living report now!

We have just released our latest Secret Agent report!

Think about that time you stepped into the modern, sleek room of a display home. You might have felt a little cold, unwelcome, like you didn’t want to dirty anything. Compare this to when you last visited your grandmother’s house. There was a sensed comfort and warmth from the moment you entered. There are times you feel at home in a friend’s house, yet other houses have you feeling more excited to go back to the comfort of your own home.

In this report, Secret Agent discusses how we perceive different kinds of room interiors. There isn’t a one size fits all rule, but our perceptions have potentially significant implications that should be considered by both buyers and vendors in property transactions.

Access the Perceptions of Interiors report now!

11/109 Oxford St, Collingwood (realestate.com.au)

In real estate, high ceilings are a big selling point. “Soaring”, “towering”; these are common adjectives to describe anything above the average 2.7m ceiling. Besides being a rare feature in most properties, high ceilings are valuable also because of the psychological benefits to the people living or working under them.

High ceilings encourage us to think more freely, enhancing creative thinking.

A study conducted in Texas in 2007 found that 8-feet (2.4metre) ceilings activated confinement-related concepts, while taller 10-feet (3metre) ceilings encouraged better freedom-related tasks. In another experiment, participants in high-ceilinged rooms were able to create more abstract solutions than their low-ceilinged counterparts. Read the full post

Last spring, Secret Agent investigated the cost of rebuilding two period homes in inner Melbourne using current technology and materials. Our results below demonstrate that the prices paid for period property fairly represent the quality, history and scarcity of these types of homes in today’s market.

Using real examples of a Victorian terrace and an Edwardian house, we found that recreating these homes from scratch would cost at least $740,000 more than what you would pay for a genuine period home.

While it is possible to build a new home that imitates the defining features of Victorian and Edwardian houses, replacing period character to its full extent is almost impossible to get right. Note that the figures in the analysis of replacement values are conservative estimates only. Read the full post

This week, we continue to explore the results of our Better Apartments Design Standards study.

One of the factors that had a very high pass rate was maximum room depth. However, given that this standard simply measured whether the depth of habitable space was less than a fixed value (1.5 times the ceiling height, or 9.7m if there is a rear kitchen, see Figure 1), this may not necessarily be a good thing. Smaller apartments are more likely to pass simply because if room dimensions are smaller, apartment depth will naturally be smaller too.

Read the full post

As part of the Victorian Government’s Better Apartments Design Standards, three new rules were introduced for minimum room dimensions. These determine the minimum width and depth of main bedrooms, additional bedrooms as well as minimum size and dimension of living areas. For more detail, refer to our latest report. We sampled 3000 apartments built over the past 6 years in inner Melbourne.

Our research finds that if the new standards were already in place when the apartments were developed, only 7.7% (231 apartments) would have passed the minimum requirements for all three room dimension standards. Read the full post

Last week, we released our findings on the state of recently built apartments in comparison to the Better Apartments Design Standards. What we found only confirmed our intuitive assumptions of inner Melbourne’s apartments: they’re generally hard to live in. Read the full post

We have just released our latest Secret Agent report!

This month, Secret Agent reviews the quality of apartments built in the last 6 years and compares them with Victoria’s new Better Apartments Design Standards. If constructed today, how many of these apartments are actually compliant? In which criteria do we observe the highest fail rates?

Access the Better Apartments: Before There Were Standards report now!