A wasted hallway is rarely a hallway that is too wide. It is a hallway that is too long, or one that serves too few rooms for its length, and both of those were decided by where the front door and the stair went. That is why this problem is cheap to fix early and expensive to fix late.
First, work out which kind of waste you have
Three faults produce a bad hallway and they have different fixes. Look at your plan and decide which one you are looking at before moving anything.
- A long spine. The corridor runs most of the length of the house because the entrance is at one end. The fix is the entrance or the stair, moves 1 and 4.
- A one-sided corridor. Rooms open off one side and a blank external wall runs down the other. The fix is move 2, and it is usually a matter of which rooms face which way.
- A fat hall. The circulation is short but 1600 to 2000 mm wide with nothing in it. The fix is move 6: give the width to storage or to the room next door.
The one thing all three have in common is that none of them is fixed by making the corridor narrower. Work out what the circulation actually costs first, using the circulation percentage, so you can tell whether you are chasing 6 m² or 0.6.
The six moves
| Move | Typical saving | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Move the entrance toward the middle | 2–5 m² | Halves the longest route in one decision. The biggest single saving, and only available early. |
| Put rooms on both sides of the corridor | 2–4 m² | Halves the corridor per room served. A corridor with a blank wall down one side is the classic waste. |
| Cluster the doors into one hall | 2–4 m² | One square hall reaching four doors beats a corridor walking past them. |
| Move the stair into the circulation | 2–4 m² | The stair and the landing become one space instead of two, on both storeys. |
| Let the living space do the walking | 3–6 m² | Rooms opening off a living space need no corridor at all. Costs privacy, so spend it on the public rooms. |
| Take the width back as storage | 0–2 m² | A 600 mm cupboard along a 1500 mm hall leaves 900 mm of hall and gains a wardrobe. |
The savings assume an ordinary house of 80 to 120 m². They are not additive: doing move 1 well often makes moves 3 and 4 unnecessary, because a central entrance tends to produce a central hall with the stair in it.
1. Move the entrance toward the middle
The front door sets the longest route in the house. Enter at a gable end and something has to walk the length of the plan; enter near the middle and the longest route is half of that. On a 12 m long house, moving the door from the end to the centre removes about 5 m of corridor, which at a metre wide is 5 m² returned to the rooms.
This is the earliest and least reversible decision on the list, because the entrance is fixed by the street, the parking, the site levels and often by the planning drawings. If it genuinely cannot move, go straight to move 4: a stair in the middle recovers much of the same benefit on the upper floor.
2. Serve rooms from both sides
A corridor with doors on both sides costs half as much per room as one with a blank wall down one side. The blank wall is usually an external wall, which means the plan is one room deep, and a one-room-deep plan is the most expensive shape a house can take for both circulation and heat loss.
The move is to deepen the plan and put the rooms that tolerate a single aspect, such as bathrooms, utility and storage, on the side away from the view. It is a bigger change than it sounds, so test it as blocks before drawing walls.
3. Cluster the doors into one hall
Four doors along a corridor is four times the walking. Four doors around a square hall is one space doing four jobs. The rule of thumb is that a hall should reach at least three doors; a piece of circulation serving one or two rooms is a piece of those rooms that got away.
Watch the door swings when you cluster. Doors need about 800 mm of clear floor to stand and open in, and four doors opening into a 900 mm hall will foul each other. A hall reaching four doors wants to be about 1500 to 2000 mm across, which is wider than the corridor it replaces and still costs less floor, because it is a fraction of the length. The figures are in the door sizes guide.
4. Put the stair inside the circulation
A stair standing in a room of its own needs a landing at the top and a hall at the bottom, and both of those are circulation you are paying for twice. A stair rising out of the hall shares that floor. On the storey above, a stair arriving in the middle of the plan means a landing rather than a corridor, which is often the single biggest saving available on an upper floor.
The flight itself needs a clear width of about 900 mm and roughly 4 to 5 m of run for a straight flight, so it is a large object to move late. An L-shaped or U-shaped flight is more compact in plan and turns the arrival back toward the middle, which is exactly what a landing wants.
5. Let the living space do the walking
Circulation only counts as waste when the floor is doing nothing else. A route across a living or dining space is floor already earning its keep, which is why open-plan houses spend 8 to 10 per cent on circulation rather than 15.
Spend this move on the public rooms and not on the private ones. A kitchen reached across the living room is fine; a bathroom reached across it is not, and a bedroom opening directly into it loses both acoustic and visual privacy. The honest version of this move is a house where the public rooms flow and a short hall still protects the bedrooms.
Keep the route out of the furniture. A living room the plan walks through needs a clear path of 800 to 900 mm that does not cut between the sofa and the television. If the only route runs through the seating, the room has been made into a corridor with a sofa in it, and the saving was not real.
6. Take the width back as storage
A hall of 1600 mm or more with nothing in it is the least productive floor in a house. Line one side with 600 mm of shallow cupboard and you keep 1000 mm of usable hall, which is a comfortable width, and you gain a run of storage that would otherwise have taken a corner of a bedroom.
This works in the entrance hall, where coats, shoes and a meter cupboard have to live somewhere, and along an upper landing, where the linen cupboard does. It is the smallest saving on the list in square metres and often the most useful in practice, because storage displaced from a bedroom is storage that was making the bedroom feel small.
What a corridor is worth keeping for
Not all hallway floor is waste, and a plan optimised to zero circulation is usually unpleasant. A corridor buys four things that are difficult to buy any other way:
- Acoustic separation. A corridor between the living room and the bedrooms is two doors and a buffer instead of one door.
- Privacy on the route. Reaching a bathroom without crossing a social space matters most in the plans where floor is tightest.
- Doors that do not open into rooms. Four doors into a living space costs that space its wall length and its furniture positions.
- An entrance that is a place. A front door opening directly into the living room is a draught, a sightline and nowhere to stand while taking off a coat.
The target is not the smallest possible hallway. It is a hallway whose every square metre is reaching a door, holding storage or making an entrance, and none of it merely being walked along.