Reply to American Living in London for 12 Years: AMA

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]British houses are smaller than their American counterparts. Quite often much smaller. Take this upmarket new build in an affluent London suburb: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-68201313.html you can see from the floorplan how small the house really is. And because of the cooler and damper climate, houses were rarely built with large open rooms but rather multiple small closed rooms, which were easier to heat. It's only been recently that you started seeing the open kitchen-family room great room combination in newer properties.

On the other hand, there's also plenty of very large houses in Britain. Leagues of gorgeous old rectories, Victorian villas and Georgian houses all over Britain. But most British people do live in much smaller quarters than Americans do. Generally speaking you get more space the further away from London.

Housing quality varies, especially for new builds. Lots of cheaply built flats and terraced houses, but also amazingly well built bigger houses at the same time with solid masonry and slate, unlike in the US.[/quote]

It seems like most UK kitchens have those high gloss cabinets?  I've never been a fan.  Also, is central air/heat not a thing there?  It's funny to me as an American to see those old-school radiators in each room.[/quote]

Brit here who now lives here. Kitchen design (and design generally) is much more modern. The shaker cabinet, subway tile thing is unusual and I've seen it in only in a few houses where I think they are trying to emulate that style from the US. Much more common is the IKEA look, at the cheaper end, and German or Italian kitchens like Poggenpohl at the higher end. Most houses have what we call central heating, but it just means a centrally controlled system for the radiators, which you then adjust in each room as needed. I actually love this kind of heating! Most houses do not have a/c, generally because of the climate - it is rarely needed. For maybe 2 or 3 weeks a year you might wish you had it, but otherwise it wouldn't be needed. It is also rarely humid, even when it is hot. 
House building materials are also really different. Here, houses are built with a lot of wood - they are framed, but in the UK breeze blocks are used - big bricks made of cement - and then inside walls are plastered, there is no drywall.

I grew up in a London suburb and we had a big house and garden. Not huge by US standards but it felt very spacious, and it was pretty big for London  - it was about 4000sqft. This is not it, but this is a similar house in a similar suburb:
https://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/53957313?search_identifier=d05856ad99421d50318c008a7f69232e

This is similar to the first place I bought with my husband where we had 2 kids before moving here:

https://www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/54442173?search_identifier=fc55af0384b0b12b2e7a3ac6cc932c7b[/quote]

Lovely homes, but oh my the price tags!  I doubt many Londoners in DC would ever complain about our cost of property.[/quote]

Correct, we do not! I consider DC property to be very cheap, and selling our London house, especially with the exchange rate as it then was, allowed us to buy a really great house here. [/quote]

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