Making housing more affordable and accessible is part of bettering the lives of Canadians, but if more housing is to be built, what kind will it be? And where? Invariably, driving north out of Toronto shows what ongoing development could look like—agricultural land, fields, and forests being turned into suburbs adjacent to strip malls. Every person needs a home and nearby amenities, but it makes one wonder if there’s a different approach to making that a reality.
While talk of renovation for old apartment buildings and houses is perhaps more likely to come up in the Estonian context than a housing crisis, which we hear so much about in Canada, Estonia does experience affordability issues like Canada, when salaries don’t align with the cost of housing in urban areas like Tallinn.
Thus, any suggested strategies regarding efficient housing ought to be considered, regardless of which side of the ocean one lives on.
In 2023, Eesti Elu columnist Evi Mustel discussed laneway houses as a means to increase density in single family neighbourhoods. Indeed, you can see more and more of these appearing when you walk around such neighbourhoods in Canada.
And when it comes to low-maintenance, streamlined, durable home construction, one company that has come up is E4House, based in Tallinn. At the core, E4House designs and constructs reinforced concrete homes. We’ve seen that before plenty. And as they point out, building with concrete makes for an extremely durable house. It retains heat well (and therefore keeps your heating bills lower). It provides sound insulation. It’s fire-resistant (reducing insurance costs). It doesn’t get moldy or infested by pests. Sadly, wood doesn’t provide these qualities. The downsides of concrete are that its production depends on the heavy use of fossil fuels. And on a consumer-level, Green Building Canada notes that “As a heavier product, concrete raises the building cost due to transport charges. It also lengthens the construction process. The comparative per-square-foot costs also depend upon the fluctuation in the respective material prices; for example, the recent spike in lumber prices during the pandemic reduced the variance between building costs using the two materials.”
That being said, the concrete used in E4House’s builds, such as the “Kangru” or “Muraste,” can be produced with recycled materials. Likewise, heat recovery ventilation systems and air/water heat pumps are mentioned in their house specifications, which would reduce costs, along with resource consumption and long-term energy usage.
What stands out most, though, is the economical use of space in the rooms of each house they’ve designed. Bedrooms, bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and even sauna rooms are all nestled closely into one another, which would create a cozy home environment and closeness between occupants. It cuts out dead space. Which poses a question: could it be that extra, unused home space is just space that will be filled with things we don’t need anyway?
As a result of these compact house layouts, the lots we see in their 3D models show room for more green space outdoors to maximize pleasant weather when we have it. The ideal situation would be to reutilize previously-built-on land for this space, apply soft landscaping features, and then live within a more compact house footprint.
Somehow, even though the E4House structures aren’t made of glass and steel, the designs are reminiscent of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, particularly the way inhabitants can move easily through the rooms that wrap around the centre, enclosed in wood. (Another cool detail here: the house is raised off of the ground and all utilities come up through one tube underneath.)
Houses like these may not work for everyone. There’s never a one-size-fits-all solution, but the simplicity of the designs seem to be a sign of society focusing on what is really needed when it comes to housing.
