With Australia in the grips of a housing affordability crisis, home dwellers are looking to different ways of cohabiting. Multigenerational living – where more than one generation of related adults live under one roof – is nothing new, but it is gaining traction.
According to Dr Edgar Liu from UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre, who co-authored the new book, Living Together: The rise of multigenerational households in Australian cities, more than half of those that choose this way of living do so for financial reasons.
“Fifty-five per cent of our survey respondents said finance was one of the reasons they decided to live together,” says Dr Liu.
“Some elaborated and said that they can’t rent on their own, or afford to rent and save for a deposit at the same time, some are paying their parents’ mortgage, or co-purchasing with their parents or children.”
The City Futures Research Centre gathered its research from surveys, interviews and diaries in Sydney and Brisbane, as well as making use of census analysis.
With this living arrangement come questions of how best to organise the space to ensure harmonious relations amongst the generations. The researchers found that 59 per cent of multigenerational dwellers that took part in the survey noted a lack of privacy as the most common dislike of this living arrangement.
“That [privacy] is certainly impacted by the layout of the homes; open plan means noise travels, and there may be times when different household members would want to watch different television programs, or one might want to watch TV while someone else might want to read quietly,” says Dr Liu.
Dr Liu notes that space separation is important, such as having separate sleeping quarters but common living spaces.
“Some companies now design houses, and even apartments, called dual-key apartments specifically with multigenerational households in mind,” he says.
One such company is property developer Sekisui House which is responding to the need by offering homes that cater to this market.
“We tend to design houses with flexibility, a universal design for all ages,” says Makoto Ochiai, who is the product development and manufacturing manager for the Japanese company’s SHAWOOD homes division.
“We think about what the home and its environment will look like in 10, 20 and 50 years.”
The company’s design philosophy is to build homes that will be able to be changed as the needs of the owners change over the decades.
Within Australia, Sekisui House offers a variety of built form options at its residential estates at The Hermitage in New South Wales and Ecco Ripley in Queensland.
“We have a larger two-storey product where one of the bedrooms is on the ground floor. It can be used as a guest room or a study space but then if, for example, grandparents move in, it can be their room, separate from other floors so it offers privacy,” says Ochiai.
Another factor to take into consideration when building or buying is practicality.
“In Japan, we do lots of research in terms of multigenerational living. For example, we are developing a flexible kitchen system where you can adjust the height of the bench top. It’s automated to suit the young and active as well as those older and those in a wheelchair,” says Ochiai.
It is also developing an automated sensory system that can monitor the health of inhabitants.
“It will be able to sense movement and if say a senior falls unconscious while no one else is at home, it will be able to sense this and contact authorities,” says Ochiai.
It’s an important consideration given the City Futures Research Centre found the second most common factor that people chose multigenerational living was the need to provide care or support.
“This includes grandparents providing child care, adult offspring caring for elderly parents, or a disabled family member,” says Dr Liu.
https://www.domain.com.au/news/how-the-rise-of-multigenerational-living-is-changing-the-way-we-build-housing-20170428-gvv1rh/
article form domain.com.au by Andrea Black