One of the things that I have noticed while walking around Lyon is that there seems to be a lot of office space right at street level.
And most of it does not seem to have a consumer-facing element where people just walk in off the street.
There’s something nice about seeing beautiful spaces and people sitting at their desks (I walked past people sitting on exercise balls). It’s another way of animating the street.
Personally, I’d love to have an office right at ground level, similar to the above. But it’s not usually where our minds immediately go. We usually default to retail. Or at least I do.
So I’m going to work to remove this blind spot from my mental models. Office right on the street can clearly work really work.
I recently asked this on Twitter:
You live in an apartment/condominium. If you could pick one ideal use/tenant for the ground floor of your building, what would it be?
And a number of people responded.
But I suppose I should also answer my own question.
I lean more towards utility. My ideal use -- assuming an urban storefront -- is not a fancy restaurant or a super cool coffee shop. It would be some sort of quality bodega that:
Sells essential grocery needs (milk, eggs, toilet paper, etc.)
Sells wine & beer
Has a deli/food counter where you can buy a breakfast bagel, a sandwich for lunch, or a quick dinner when you're in a pinch
And, yes, has pretty good coffee
It would also need to be open early and late: 7am to 12am, please.
What would you want?
One of the things that is common in Europe is that building floors often start with zero for the ground floor and then go both up and down from there.
This is different than most of North America where the ground floor is usually floor number 1 (regardless of what it might be called) and then the floors go up from there.
Using the pictured example (above), the key difference is that, with the ground floor as zero, you end up with the above-grade floors being off by 1 and the top floor being 6 instead of 7.
There is a certain rationality to the European approach that I like, but I am curious how suites on ground floors get typically numbered. I will seek this out and report back.
At Junction House, our ground floor residences follow 101, 102, 103, etc. Following the exact same logic, the European equivalent would be 001, 002, 003, etc. This, admittedly, feels a bit odd.
Which floor convention do you find more intuitive?
Either way, I’m thinking about adopting the European approach for no other reason than that height is a sensitive topic in the world of development, so one less “headline” floor could be helpful. (Half-joking)