Service room resists in luxury properties, but its days are numbered

Apartments with specific rooms for domestic servants are still being launched in the country. However, if in the 1960s space was even found in two-bedroom apartments, today the environment, called a maid’s room, service room or employee’s quarters, only appears in large units, a minority of the market – in 2021, only 1% of the apartments launched in São Paulo had more than 180 square meters, according to data from Secovi-SP (Sindicato da Habitação).

In smaller properties, the increase in the price per square meter and the demand for more space for the bedrooms and the social portion of the house, such as the living room and balcony, have priority in the use of the area that could be used by the service room, analyzes Bianca. Setin, director of operations for the developer that bears his surname.

Maria Augusta Justi, professor of the Architecture course at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, explains that the service room is a continuation of the dynamics between the big house and the slave quarters, which took root in Brazilian culture when cities were verticalized.

“This space has been around for many centuries in the history of Brazilian architecture, and was born with the aim of segregating workers,” he says.

It’s also a room that’s doomed to disappear or have other uses, says Justi. This is because, in 2018, less than 1% of Brazilian domestic workers — about 46,000 workers — slept at their workplace, according to a study by Ipea (Institute of Applied Economic Research), with data from Pnad Contínua. In 1995, at the beginning of the historical series, they were 12%, reaching 23% in the Northeast.

The room is, as a rule, cramped, with space for a single bed and a closet. According to the São Paulo Building and Construction Code, a residential room dedicated to rest must have a minimum area of ​​5 square meters, but an ABNT standard on building performance uses other parameters, such as thermal comfort, light and ventilation, the which allows a different volume, according to the teacher. “It can have one side with 2 meters and the other a little smaller”, says Justi.

At Setin, for example, rooms are usually around 3 square meters. In a search on the website of seven developers, rooms with an area of ​​3 to 5.86 square meters were found – larger than the smallest dormitory found in the social area of ​​the properties sought, of 6.55 square meters.

This area, in old and high-end properties, has its own entrance door and service elevator, physical barriers separating the condominiums. Justi points out, however, that since 1996 a municipal law prohibits discrimination in elevators.

Today, the reduction in the size of families reduces the amount of domestic service that needs to be performed, and technology makes it possible to hire employees according to demand, as in the case of day laborers, chefs, runners and the transport service by application, which contributes to the drop in the hiring of housemaids who sleep in the residences.

Surveys by the consulting firm IDados and researcher Daniel Duque, from Ibre-FGV (Brazilian Institute of Economics, from Fundação Getulio Vargas) indicate that, in December last year, 91.6% of these workers were women, according to Pnad (National Survey for Sample of Households) Continuous.

In addition, the average monthly income was BRL 953 — for men, this average was higher, at BRL 1,210 — and below the average monthly income of all Brazilian workers (BRL 2,377). The numbers also show that the average age of those who provide services to families was 43.1 years and that 65.8% of them declared themselves as pretos or pardos.

Housework in numbers

Source: PnadC, with IDados and Daniel Duque (Ibre/FGV)

Duque agrees that cultural changes, the reduction of wage inequality and labor reforms (including specific changes to housekeepers) have made it prohibitive for the vast majority of families to maintain a permanent domestic worker, especially one who sleeps at home.

He considers, however, that it is not necessarily good or bad for the worker to be able to provide services to more than one family during the week. It will depend on how much he can adapt to this more flexible model.

“On the one hand, it increases the volatility of these workers’ earnings, but it also shifts labor relations to something closer to the client and service provider, as in more developed countries, and allows for higher average earnings”, he says.

According to the lawyer of Sindoméstica (Sindicato das Empregadas e Trabalhadores Domésticos of Greater São Paulo), Nathalie Rosário, it is bad for the worker when the fixed employee becomes a day worker, since inspection becomes more difficult and a greater number of them are unprotected and without pension rights.

For Tatiana Roque, a professor at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and vice-president of the Brazilian Basic Income Network, the PEC das Domésticas brought negative social reactions due to the greater difficulty that some middle-class families had to keep the worker at home. .

“The greatest difficulty in hiring, in this case, was positive. The helplessness that the pandemic brought to these workers, however, is something worrying and that needs to be observed. career.”

She adds that the lower number of housewives who sleep at work and the reflection of this in the real estate market is something positive. “Either these people were exploited over time or they lived very far from their jobs. That’s why we advocate a basic income so that no one has to subject themselves to bad working conditions.”

The fate of the maid’s room

“Larger apartments tend to be fully customizable spaces where, in most cases, customers use [o quarto de serviço] for other uses”, says Guilherme Benevides, executive director of the developer Gafisa.

Historically, the service room was a space that could be converted into another room. In buildings from past decades it is possible to find rooms with two doors, one for the service area and another for the social area of ​​the property, so that the residents could choose what use they would make of the space.

“[Em imóveis] from 200, 250 square meters, you will find [o quarto de serviço]but it does not mean that it will be used, normally the room becomes a storage room, silverware, home office”, says Marcello Romero, executive director of Bossa Nova Sotheby’s real estate, specialized in high standard.

During the pandemic, says Justi, the room was an option for those who needed a more secluded space to study or work.

With renovations, it can be attached to the living room, increasing the space of the social area, or to the kitchen. It is also possible to create a new bathroom for the property there.

Developers are already anticipating this desire to modify the area and offer plans with different uses for this space. Setin, for example, announced the residential HI Pinheiros, launched last year, with units measuring 178 square meters with options that included a maid’s room, pantry or extended kitchen.

According to Bianca Setin, the proportion of buyers who choose to keep the room as a utility room, use it as a pantry or take advantage of the space to expand the kitchen is similar.

The real estate market is adapting to the new reality of labor legislation and family culture, and the academy has also changed the way of thinking about the room for domestic workers, which should impact future projects.

“When I studied, it was very common to have to share space [do imóvel] between service, social and intimate, but today these spaces interact”, he says. “We no longer use these class separations within the residence project.”