About Refined Space

What this site is#

Refined Space covers one subject properly rather than many badly: the dimensional side of interiors. Clearances, furniture sizes, fixture spacing, hanging heights, lighting levels, proportion. If a question can be answered with a number and a reason, it belongs here. If it can only be answered with taste, it does not.

The site exists because that information is scattered. The authoritative numbers live in documents most people never see (the IRC, the NKBA planning guidelines, the IES handbook, the anthropometric literature), and the accessible versions on the open web are mostly commodity blog posts that repeat each other without citation and disagree by 6 in on basic figures. We put the number, the source and the reasoning on the same page.

Who writes it#

Refined Space is compiled by a small editorial desk rather than by a roster of named authors, and we would rather say that than invent bylines. Pages are attributed to the desk, dated, and revised when a source changes or a reader finds a mistake.

We are not licensed architects, engineers or building inspectors, and the site does not pretend otherwise. What we are is careful with sources: every dimensional claim is traceable to a published code, a trade planning guideline, an ergonomics reference or explicitly labelled trade practice. Where a figure is our own judgement, the page says so in those words.

How it is produced#

Pages are researched, drafted and edited with the help of AI language models, working from the standards and reference works listed on the standards page, under human editorial direction and review. We state that because readers deserve to know how what they are reading was made, and because the alternative, quietly implying a team of named experts that does not exist, is exactly the kind of thing this site was built to be an antidote to.

What that does not mean: it does not mean numbers are generated and published unchecked. The how we measure page sets out the verification process each figure goes through, including the rule that a number without an attributable source does not get published.

How it is funded#

Refined Space is funded by display advertising served by third parties. Nothing else: we sell nothing, we have no affiliate links, we take no payment for coverage, placement or a favourable mention, and no advertiser sees a page before it is published or has any say in what it says. The editorial process described above runs without reference to what is advertised alongside it, and if that ever stopped being true this page would say so.

Advertising sets cookies and makes requests to other companies’ servers. What that means in practice, and how to control it, is set out in full on the privacy page. Ads are kept out of the middle of a sentence, out of the tables, and off the calculators’ input fields, because a reference page that is hard to read is not doing its job.

There is no newsletter, no account system and no first-party tracking: we run no analytics of our own and we set no cookies of our own. See the privacy page for exactly what the site itself collects, which is nothing, and what its advertising partners do.

What we deliberately do not do#

• We do not give code compliance advice. Codes are adopted and amended locally. We tell you what the model code says; your building official tells you what applies to your project.
• We do not review products or link to shops. Dimensions are the subject, not purchasing.
• We do not publish trend content. A page about what is fashionable this season is a page that will be wrong next season, and there is no shortage of it elsewhere.
• We do not pad. A page that could be a table is a table.

Contact and corrections#

Found a number that is wrong, a source that is misquoted or a page that contradicts another page? That is the most useful message you can send us. See corrections for how we handle them and contact for how to get in touch.