Soviet small family house

house for small families (Малосемейка) - an apartment building consisting of a large number of one-room apartments of a small area, as well as an apartment in such a house. The widespread type of housing in the countries of the former USSR, erected in the period 1960-1990. Small families are an intermediate type of housing between dormitories and individual apartments. Most of the apartments-small families were built for young families (including childless), for whom there were not enough apartments in ordinary houses or they did not rely on them on the norms of housing provision.

A small family house is a multi-apartment building with a height of 5, 9 or 12 floors. The material of the walls can be brick or reinforced concrete panels ; as a whole, the construction of small-scale buildings does not differ from the "Brezhnev" houses of the same construction period. Projects of small family houses were usually part of the typical series 1-447, 114-85, 111-121, II-32, etc.

The house consists of one large section with a corridor-type entrance and a large number of apartments on the floor (10-20). This house differs from the standard Soviet multi-section " Khrushchev " and "brezhnevok", which had no more than 8 apartments on the floor (usually 4). In small families above 5 floors there is one passenger elevator (12-story also cargo-passenger) and a garbage disposal facility on the building.

Apartments-small families include a living room standard (16-20 m 2 ) or reduced (11-12 m 2 ) area, a separate kitchen with a street window, a combined bathroom with a bath and a small hallway. In some projects of small-family houses there are two-room apartments of reduced area (40-44 m 2 ). Sometimes the apartment has a pantry and a small (2-3 m 2 ) balcony or balcony. The total area of the small family can coincide with the area of a typical one-room apartment (29-40 m 2 ), small families with a reduced room have an area of 21-26 m 2. In the latter case, the apartment is also called "malometrazhka.

The difference between a small family and a hotel is that there is always a separate kitchen in the small family with a street window. The kitchen area in some projects can reach up to 9-10 m 2. The small family always has a full-size bath in the bathroom, while in the hotel there can be a sitting bath or shower.

Currently, small families are popular as a variant of budget housing for single, childless, students, young families, elderly parents when traveling with older children. The popularity of low-scores is largely due to the tightness in the means, which does not allow immediately to buy a full-sized multi-room apartment. Due to the popularity of low-cost compact housing, many new buildings economy class have a similar layout with small families: corridor entrances with plenty of one-bedroom apartments and studio apartments.

Source from Wikipedia