New Trend: Apartments with Windowless Bedrooms? (Washington: 2015, house, construction)
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Are apartments with windowless bedrooms a new trend in DC? I recently helped a friend look for a new apartment, and was shocked at how the newly constructed buildings are passing off windowless dens as bedrooms, and charging bedroom prices for the units. How does this even pass the housing code? I thought that bedrooms had to have a window for fire safety.
Better question is who wants to shell out $2500 a month to sleep in an oversized closet?
Agreed, this is probably illegal. If this was a shared house situation or an english basement, the story may be different, but for an apartment it is deeply questionable if this was okay.
There was another brand new building in Shaw we looked at an none of the units had bedroom windows. The pricing sheet would have the unit listed as a 1bd or 2bd, but the floorplan labels the rooms as dens.
Apartment buildings have different egress and fireproofing rules from homes. The windows on those floor plans look sealed so really the only egress from the apartment is through the apartment door. The building looks to have two stairwells which are built to be fireproof and provide the multiple means of egress required.
The advantage for a builder should be pretty obvious: fewer windows = less perimeter = lower cost. That's especially the case for the Lex, which used to be an office building. Office buildings tend to have very deep floors, since cubicle farms aren't meant to have windows.
I don't know whether I could live with "borrowed light," personally, since (1) I like direct sunlight and (2) there's always a big gap between wall and ceiling, which destroys sonic privacy within the unit. That's fine for someone living alone, but that usually won't be the case in a 2-BR.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zack
The building looks to have two stairwells which are built to be fireproof and provide the multiple means of egress required.
^ This is correct. The requirement for "a window in every bedroom" is really for two fire exits from every bedroom -- which usually gets built as one door and one window. Since high-rise windows don't count as fire exits anyways, the two exits are the two exit stairs within the building. In most cases, these bedrooms will have two doors that can be used to exit: one to a hallway, and one through a bathroom to a hallway.
You'll often see such bedrooms marked as "dens" on architectural plans. That's not always a sign of subterfuge; I've seen "dens" include bedrooms which had individual rear balconies, since code doesn't allow a fire exit path (in that case, to the rear balcony) go through a bedroom -- the thinking being that people shouldn't have to trip over their roommates' stuff while trying to escape a fire.
^ This is correct. The requirement for "a window in every bedroom" is really for two fire exits from every bedroom -- which usually gets built as one door and one window. Since high-rise windows don't count as fire exits anyways, the two exits are the two exit stairs within the building. In most cases, these bedrooms will have two doors that can be used to exit: one to a hallway, and one through a bathroom to a hallway.
There is also a separate widow requirement. See 14.502 of the Housing code.
There is also a separate widow requirement. See 14.502 of the Housing code.
The housing code was rewritten last year, and that section was struck because it duplicates the construction code. However, I think this building was built (right behind DCRA's offices) before last May, in which case the code says:
"Each habitable room shall have a glass area transmitting natural light equivalent to that which would be transmitted by a clear glass area at least equal to one tenth (1/10) of the floor area served"
The bedrooms in question have a clear glass area within the walls to the other rooms, which seems like it'd cover 10% of the floor area.
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