Storey

The attic or loft is a storey just below the roof of the building; its ceiling is often pitched and/or at a different height from that of other floors.

The existence of two incompatible conventions is a common source of confusion in international communication.

This contrasts, for example, with French usage, where a 7-storey building is called une maison à 6 (six) étages.

For example, Erdgeschoss ("ground floor") in Germany (sometimes however, Parterre, adopted from French), piano terra or pianterreno (lit.

[citation needed] In many countries in Europe, the second storey is called the "first floor", for being the first elevation.

Besides Europe, this scheme is mostly used in some large Latin American countries (including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay),[citation needed] and British Commonwealth nations (except Singapore and Canada).

When the next level is different from the others, usually with higher ceiling and better decorations, then it is called principal (main floor)[12].

This is because before elevators the apartments in the floor that required less stairs to reach was the most expensive and usually also the most luxurious one.

Buildings which have two "ground floors" at different levels (on two opposite faces, usually) might have both.

Most parts of East and Southeast Asia — including China (except for Hong Kong), Japan, Korea, and Singapore — follow the American system.

This was replaced in March 1983 with the North American scheme to create a simplified and consistent standard of numbering storeys.

However, in the absence of clear official distinction between the terms, the meaning of "floors" and "levels" have become interchangeable with "storey"; this is reflected in newer buildings.

Vietnam uses both the North American and European schemes, generally depending on the region.

[22] A national standard, TCVN 6003-1:2012 (ISO 4157-1:1998), requires architectural drawings to follow the northern scheme.

Where the total traffic necessitates a second elevator the alternate floors strategy is sometimes still applied, not only for the doorway reduction but also, provisionally upon the passengers preferring no particular floor beyond capacity, it tends toward halving the total delay imposed by the stops en route.

This typically happens when both floors have street-level entrances, as is often the case for hillside buildings with walkout basements.

Sometimes two connected buildings (such as a store and its car park) have incongruent floor numberings, due to sloping terrain or different ceiling heights.

Through Chinese cultural and linguistic influence, tetraphobia is common in many countries of East Asia.

For this reason, apartments on the 4th floor in Asian countries such as Taiwan have traditionally been cheaper to rent.

In Hong Kong, the British numbering system is now generally used, in English and Chinese alike.

This confusing state of affairs has led, for example, to numerous errors in utility billing.

[24] To avoid ambiguity, business forms often ask that storey numbers in address fields be written as accessed from an elevator.

In most of the world, elevator buttons for storeys above the ground level are usually marked with the corresponding numbers.

Older elevators in Poland have button marked P for the ground floor (parter) and S for basement (suterena).

M or MZ may also be used to designate a mezzanine level, when it is not counted as a separate floor in the building's numbering scheme.

In modern signage, at least in North America, a five-pointed star (★) additionally appears beside the button for the main entry floor.

As an example, the residential elevators at the John Hancock Center all have their main floors labeled as the 44th as in order to get from a residential floor to the ground one would need to take two elevators: one from the residences to the sky lobby, and the other from the sky lobby to the ground.

In English-speaking countries, besides the common L for "Lobby", one may find P for "Platform" (in train stations), "Pool"[citation needed] or "Parking"[27] (and P1, P2, P3, Pn for multiple parking floors), S for "Skyway" or "Street" (ST is also often used to indicate Street), C for "Casino" or "Concourse", R for "Restaurant" or Roof, PH for "Penthouse", OD for "observation deck", W for Walkway, T for Tunnel, Ticketing or Trains, etc.

In The Landmark Annex of TriNoma, DSn (n=floor) denotes the floor label of the department store area.

This trick is sometimes used to make the floor number slightly less obvious, e.g. for security or marketing reasons.