Entry hall and landing sizes

The entry is the only room in a house whose dimensions are set almost entirely by things that move. A door swings through it, a person stops in it, and a second person waits behind the first. None of those appear on a floor plan, which is why entries drawn at the minimum are the rooms most often rebuilt.

Landing, hall and lobby are three different things#

The words get used interchangeably and they are not the same object.

A landing is a code-defined surface on each side of a door or at the end of a flight of stairs. It has a required depth in the direction of travel and a required width, and it exists so that a person can stand still while a door moves or a stair ends. It is a safety provision.

A hall is circulation: a route with a width, measured wall face to wall face at the narrowest point, which for a hallway means ignoring the skirting but not ignoring a radiator.

An entry hall or lobby is a room that has to contain both of those plus a place to stop, take off a coat and put down what you are carrying. It is the only one of the three that has a floor area rather than a dimension, and it is the one no code describes.

Measure them separately. The landing depth is taken from the face of the closed door, not the frame and not the threshold nosing, in the direction you walk. Hall width is taken at the narrowest point along the route, which in an older house is often at a stair string or a boxed-in pipe rather than at the wall. The order of operations for taking those measurements matters more here than in a rectangular room, because an entry is usually the least square space in the house.

What the codes require at the door#

Two of those numbers do most of the damage in practice. The 36 in (91 cm) landing depth is measured in the direction of travel, so at a door that opens into the side of a corridor rather than along it, the landing is the corridor's width, and a 36 in corridor is exactly at the limit with nothing to spare. And the 32 in clear width for an accessible door is not the leaf size: a 36 in (91 cm) leaf gives about 33.75 in (86 cm) of clear opening once the door thickness and the stop are subtracted, while a 34 in (86 cm) leaf gives about 31.75 in (81 cm) and just misses, which is why 36 in is the standard specification on an accessible route. The full set of leaf sizes and what each one clears is in door sizes, swings and the space they need.

The swing is a fifth of a small entry#

A hinged door sweeps a quarter circle whose radius is the leaf width. The area is pi x r squared / 4:

• 30 in (76 cm) leaf: 707 sq in, 4.9 sq ft (0.46 m2)
• 32 in (81 cm) leaf: 804 sq in, 5.6 sq ft (0.52 m2)
• 36 in (91 cm) leaf: 1,018 sq in, 7.1 sq ft (0.66 m2)
• 42 in (107 cm) leaf: 1,385 sq in, 9.6 sq ft (0.89 m2)

Now put a standard 36 in front door into a 5 x 5 ft entry of 25 sq ft (2.3 m2). The swing accounts for 28 per cent of the floor. Add a 30 in (76 cm) coat closet door on the adjacent wall and its 4.9 sq ft takes another 20 per cent. Half the room is arc. What is left, if the two arcs do not overlap, is 13 sq ft (1.2 m2), which is a rectangle roughly 36 x 52 in (91 x 132 cm): one person, standing, with the shopping on the floor.

That is the arithmetic behind the recommendation below, and it is also the argument for the alternatives. A door that opens outward gives all 7.1 sq ft back, at the cost of a landing outside that must be at least as deep. A sliding or pocket door gives it back with no landing penalty at all, which is why pocket doors earn their cost in entries more than anywhere else in a house. The comparison of what each door type costs in floor area is set out in door swing, clearance and approach space.

Entry hall footprints that work#

These are our own working figures, built up from the swing, a standing zone of 24 x 18 in (61 x 46 cm) per person, and the furniture depths in the next section. Only the first row is a code figure.

The 60 in (152 cm) turning circle in the last row is the ADA figure, and it is the reason a genuinely accessible entry is a different room rather than a bigger one: a 5 x 7 ft entry cannot contain a 60 in circle clear of the door swing at all, whereas a 6 x 8 ft one can if the swing is placed carefully. The alternative is the 60 x 36 in T-turn, which fits spaces the circle does not, and both are set out in wheelchair turning and manoeuvring space. Comparable minimums for every other room are collected in standard and minimum room sizes.

The depth budget along one wall#

An entry is really a depth problem. Each wall has a budget, and the circulation takes what is left.

Read the last two rows together and the case for sliding closet doors in a narrow entry makes itself: the hinged version needs 54 in (137 cm) in front of a 24 in cupboard, so wall to wall it is a 78 in (198 cm) room. The sliding version needs 54 in total. The full depth and rod arithmetic is in coat closet dimensions, and the console heights that go with the third row are in entry console and mirror heights.

Landings at stairs, and the entry that has one in it#

A stair landing follows the same 36 in (91 cm) rule in the IRC: at the top and bottom of a flight, a landing at least as wide as the stair it serves and at least 36 in deep in the direction of travel. Approved Document K sets the length of a landing at not less than the width of the flight, and permits a door to swing across the landing at the bottom of a flight only where a clear space of about 400 mm (16 in) remains across the full width.

Where a stair lands in the entry, three dimensions collide and the order they are resolved in matters:

1. Headroom comes first, at 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m) measured vertically from the nosing line, because it cannot be bought back later without moving the stair.
2. The bottom landing comes second, at 36 in (91 cm) clear of the bottom riser, and it must not be the same floor as the front door's swing.
3. The stair width comes third, at 36 in (91 cm) minimum above the handrail, reducing to 31.5 in (80 cm) clear with one handrail projecting.

The rise and run that decide where the flight lands, and therefore how much entry is left, are worked through in stair dimensions: rise, run, headroom and handrails, and the stair rise and run calculator will tell you how far into the room the bottom step arrives before anything is built.

When there is no entry at all#

Many houses open straight into a living room, and the fix is dimensional rather than architectural. What an entry provides is a stopping place, and a stopping place needs three things: 24 x 18 in (61 x 46 cm) of floor outside the door swing, somewhere at 32 to 34 in (81 to 86 cm) to put down what you are carrying, and 4 to 12 in (10 to 30 cm) of wall depth for coats. That is a 24 in (61 cm) deep strip along one wall, roughly 6 ft (1.8 m) long, and it can be carved out of a room without a partition by using a rug edge and a change of ceiling plane.

Where a partial screen is possible, 36 to 42 in (91 to 107 cm) of half-height wall, or a 60 in (152 cm) tall unit set at right angles to the door, gives the stopping place a back without closing the room. The clearances either side of such a screen follow the same walkway logic as hallway widths that work, and the codes and guidelines all these figures are taken from are indexed in standards, codes and sources. The rest of the sequence, from approach to drop zone, runs across the entryway section.