The ‘three bedroom’ versus ‘four bedroom’ issue.

If you quickly glance at agents’ particulars, you will see that some tower flats have four bedrooms and some have three, and you may think that some flats are bigger than others.

A moment’s thought will reveal that this is not the case – but as A E Housman pointed out, thought is irksome and a moment is a long time. So let me explain.

The most numerous flat types in the towers are 1A, 1B and 1C. These all have four bedrooms plus the living room along the exterior side of the flat.

(As explained in “the fourth bedroom versus dining room issue”, the fourth bedroom in Type 1A was labelled a dining room by the architects, but it’s no different from the same room in the 1B and 1C types, which are bedrooms, so we’ll treat it that way.)

The flats on the lower floors of Cromwell Tower and Lauderdale Tower are all four-bedroom flats.  Upper floors in Cromwell Tower and Lauderdale Tower, and all the floors in Shakespeare Tower, contain three-bedroom flats.

In Cromwell Tower and Lauderdale Tower, the fourth bedroom has simply been removed, and all the space added to the living room. The rest of the flat remains unchanged from the standard layout.

Shakespeare Tower has its own standard flat types – 8A, 8B and 8C. In these flats the space where there could have been a fourth bedroom is split to give a larger living area and a larger third bedroom.

So you will appreciate that the floor space itself is not reduced, just because there are three bedrooms rather than four. This shouldn’t even be an issue except for the fact that we instinctively divide properties into different value categories in our minds according to the number of bedrooms.

How many rooms does a tower flat really have?

In our tables we tell you how many rooms a tower flat has. When the City of London built the Barbican Estate, they calculated the number of rooms in each flat type. That is what we are following - and repeating to you. But their counting system is a bit counter-intuitive.

Kitchens, bathrooms, shower rooms, utility rooms, WCs … basically any room with a tap in it … is excluded from the room count. So a Type 4B penthouse with two bathrooms and two shower rooms has ‘6/7 rooms’, and the Type 4C penthouse with only one shower room is also ‘6/7 rooms’.

A dining room with a door on it (like Type 1A) is a room. So 3 bedrooms, a living area, a breakfast area and a dining room are treated as ‘6 rooms’.

But a dining ‘area’, formed by pulling a sliding wall to separate the living area, is treated as something which is not quite a room. So 4 bedrooms, a living room, and a dining area were designated as ‘5/6 rooms’.

Whenever you see the room count as ‘4/5’, or ‘5/6’ or ‘6/7’ it just means that there is a sliding door which turns the living area into a smaller living area and a dining area for as long as the door is slid.

Take a ‘5/6’ room flat. Before you pull the sliding door you have a 5 room flat. Once you pull the sliding door across, you have a 6 room flat. It is a bit like Schrodinger’s Cat. The number of rooms is in an indeterminate quantum state until you look to see if the sliding door has been pulled.

It would make so much more sense if we abandoned altogether talk of the number of rooms, or what they are called, and just talked about the net internal area of a flat, and the price per square foot or metre.