[Omah]

Originally Posted by lostalex

He came in through her front door though right? so she must have let him in. and he must have walked through her entire apartment to get to the balcony.

How big is "entire" ?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10127564

The days of tiny Auckland apartments are over in the inner city with the introduction of new design controls, including a minimum studio apartment size.

Cramped apartments with poor ventilation, no sound-proofing, little natural light, and windowless and cupboard-like bedrooms will be banned.

Cheek-by-jowl apartments will be banned. Flat, ugly concrete towers will be banned.

The city's smallest apartments are about 12sq m. The Herald has visited apartments smaller than a prison cell, including a windowless room with one bed suspended in the roof area and another on the floor in an area slightly longer than a human body and about 2m wide.

The new design controls for apartments are the third initiative by the Auckland City Council in the past week to improve the appearance of the city after years of weak planning rules, lax building controls and a rubber-stamping culture by council staff.

As flagged by the Herald last week, the council is introducing minimum apartment sizes. The minimum size for a studio will be 35sq m, including an 11sq m living area, 9sq m bedroom area, 5sq m for a kitchen, 5sq m balcony and the rest for a bathroom, laundry and entry area.

The council is also taking a hard line on exterior urban design standards following an explosion in the number of cheap, ugly residential high-rise towers. New apartment blocks will have to be of "highest quality, showing creativity, innovation" and "harmonise with and complement the streetscape".

At ground level, apartments must excite pedestrians with architectural detail, shops and public open spaces. There will be minimum distances between apartment towers, for example, 25m between two 50m-tall buildings.

These controls are too late for more than a dozen apartment towers including the 417-apartment Volt building on the prime Mayoral Drive and Queen St corner and four towers in Hobson St.