A three-piece suite with a corner sofa and armchairs, preferred colours terracotta or eggshell white. A wall unit made of light-coloured wood, a coffee table, a television set and a computer with Internet access. Woodchip wallpaper on the walls, a dark-blue velvet carpet on the floor. Primroses, ivy or orchids stand on the window sill. This is what you will find in “Germany’s most typical living room”. Jung von Matt, the Hamburg-based advertising agency, has set up and furnished this room – and strictly adhered to data from the Federal Statistical Office and consumer research experts at GfK Group. It facilitates a particularly concrete form of target group research: advertising professionals meet in the expertly researched and designed room whenever they want to get as close as possible to the world of consumers. Can you get any closer than their most private surroundings? Closer than the place they have furnished according to their own tastes, the place where they live their day-to-day lives?
In the English language the verb “to live” can mean both “to dwell” and “to be alive”. German, on the other hand, makes a clear distinction between “wohnen” (dwell or reside) and “leben” (be alive or exist). The word “wohnen” has Old High German roots that originally meant “to stay” and “to be content”, which is not totally wrong today in our context. “Wohnen” is understandably considered important in Germany. Germans spend the largest proportion of their monthly income on somewhere to live – a total of roughly 700 euros on rent, maintenance and electricity and energy costs. However, that is just the average. Depending on the town, residential area and apartment or house size, the rent alone can be significantly higher or lower than that. In generally terms it can be said that you pay more for a place to live in southern Germany than in the north or east. On the other hand, according to a study by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), the population of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg believe they enjoy a particularly high quality of life. Surveys repeatedly rank Munich as the most expensive German city. Tenants in the Bavarian capital pay 70% higher rents than the average for Germany as a whole. Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Cologne and Düsseldorf are also very expensive and are at the top of the rent league table alongside Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main. On the other hand, living in the German capital is surprisingly cheap, especially when compared to other metropoles in Europe. On average, Berliners pay less than 5.50 euros per square metre a month.
Many people consider renting the second best option. The Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig has ascertained that in Germany “the desire to own property comes second in the ranking of material aspirations”. It immediately follows owning a car. Yet the level of property ownership is rather low compared with other European countries. Less than half of all German households live in their own apartments or houses. The majority rent – but only rarely a complete house: 76% of tenants live in buildings with more than three apartments.
On the other hand, the size of apartments has been steadily increasing since the 1960s. If you calculate the average for all the approximately 39 million rented and owner-occupied apartments and houses in Germany, you end up with an average living space of 90 square metres, which works out at a little over 40 square metres per head. However, these figures vary considerably depending on size of household and income. The most popular section on the real-estate websites is certainly the traditional “Three Rooms plus Kitchen and Bathroom”. Only half a century ago it was quite normal for a family of four to live in this kind of apartment – with a living room, the parents’ bedroom and a room for two children. Today, according to surveys by the Leibniz Institute, a separate room for each child is considered “appropriate”.
During the 1950s, the years of reconstruction after the Second World War, a large number of simple apartments were built relatively fast. In the following decade – in West Germany – expansion mainly occurred in the suburbs as a result of building subsidies for one-family houses. The 1970s were then characterized by the large-scale construction of areas of social housing. Since the 1980s the picture has become more multifaceted: old buildings are being modernized at considerable cost, high-quality owner-occupier properties built on a small scale, compact housing areas constructed on the edge of town and also areas of multistorey housing in the suburbs. Innovative housing experiments are also becoming increasingly popular: for example, the joint purchase of large properties with communal and private areas.
Additionally, today’s property seekers are increasingly interested in the energy consumption of houses and apartments – not only as a result of increased environmental awareness, but also for cost reasons. Since 2009 anyone who wants to buy or rent a property in Germany even has a statutory right to see the Energy Performance Certificate, which documents the energy efficiency of an apartment or a building. However, the trend is already clearly moving on – towards ecological housing. Young families in particular are drawn to these environmentally friendly settlements with low-energy or plus-energy houses. These building projects are mainly springing up in the metropolitan areas of Stuttgart, Hamburg and Munich, while Freiburg, the city that pioneered solar construction, can already boast several areas of ecological housing.
That all seems very sensible. Yet when it comes to Germans’ dream homes, they tend to be much more adventurous. In 2010, immowelt.de, a real-estate website, discovered in a survey that 25% of respondents dream of living on a cozy houseboat, 21% would like to live in a secluded farmhouse and at least 3% yearn for the supposed freedom of a builder’s caravan. That certainly doesn’t sound very much like plush eggshell-white sofas and primroses.////
