Custom home design on a narrow Burnaby lot: setbacks, light and stairs

The teardown lots we walk in Burnaby Heights and Capitol Hill are often 33 feet wide, sometimes 40. The house that replaces the old bungalow on one of those lots is going to be long and thin, and no amount of wishing changes that. What we can change is whether the middle of the plan is dark, whether the stair eats the best floor space, and whether the street side of the house is a garage door or a living room.

This post is about designing for the lot you actually have. The numbers below come from the R1 district text linked from the City of Burnaby's Zoning Bylaw page, which notes that the new zoning bylaw has been in effect since July 1, 2026 and replaces the 1965 bylaw. Confirm your own lot's rules there before you draw anything.

What the setbacks leave you to build in

The R1 Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing District sets a 1.2 metre interior side yard setback for a small-scale multi-unit lot. The street yard is 4.0 metres at the front and 3.0 metres on a flanking street. The lane yard is 1.5 metres. The interior rear yard is 3.0 metres for a principal building.

Do the arithmetic on a 33-foot lot. That is 10.06 metres of width, which clears the district's 10 metre minimum lot width for a small-scale multi-unit lot on an interior lot. Take 1.2 metres off each side and you have 7.66 metres between the setback lines. That is the widest the house can be, wall to wall, before the framing and the cladding take their share.

7.66 metres is a real constraint. A living room and a dining room cannot sit side by side across that width with a hallway between them. A stair in the middle of the plan takes a third of it. Every design decision on a narrow lot flows from that one number, which is why we run it with the owner on day one, before anyone falls in love with a plan drawn for a 60-foot lot.

The floor space ratio then decides how much house the lot allows in total. On a narrow lot the two rules pull against each other: the setbacks limit the width, so the floor area has to come from length and from the number of storeys.

Windows belong on the two short walls

Here is the thing about a 1.2 metre side yard. Your side wall sits 1.2 metres from the line, and the neighbour's side wall sits 1.2 metres on the other side of it. That is 2.4 metres, glass to glass, if both houses put windows there. Nobody wants a bedroom window that looks straight into the neighbour's bathroom.

So on a narrow lot the side walls become the walls for structure, storage and services. The glass goes on the front and the back, where the house looks at the street and at the yard, and where the setbacks give you the distance to open up.

That means the front wall and the back wall have to work hard. We push glazing to the full width of the buildable envelope on both ends, run it tall, and stack it on every floor. The daylighting post covers how far daylight travels into a room from a window, and on a narrow plan the answer is the whole problem: the middle third of a long house gets nothing from either end.

The BC Building Code sets minimum requirements for natural light and for escape windows in bedrooms; the specific values depend on the room, and we confirm them with the designer against the BC Building Code 2024. On a narrow lot those minimums are easy to meet at the ends of the house and hard to meet in the middle, which is what the next section is about.

Light wells, window wells and skylights

The middle of a long, thin house needs light from above. Three tools do most of the work.

A skylight over the stair. The stairwell already runs through every floor. Put a skylight at the top of it and it becomes a light shaft, throwing daylight down to the main floor hallway and, if the stair is open, into the basement. This is the single best daylight move on a narrow lot and we plan it before we place anything else.

A clerestory row high on a side wall. Windows set above eye height on a side wall bring in light without the privacy problem, because nobody can see in or out at that height. On a two-storey house a clerestory band above the kitchen counters is the difference between a kitchen that needs the lights on at noon and one that does not.

Window wells for the basement. The R1 district lets the ground next to the house be lowered for basement windows without affecting the building height calculation, provided the wells extend no more than 0.9 metres from the building, project no more than 0.75 metres into a required side yard, and run no longer than 25 percent of the length of that wall. Those limits are tight enough that we draw the wells to them at the design stage rather than hoping they fit later. A basement bedroom with a real window well is a bedroom; one without is a storage room.

Some plans go further and cut a small courtyard into the middle of the house, so the kitchen or dining room gets a glass wall onto a private outdoor space that is inside the setbacks. It costs floor area, and on a narrow lot floor area is the scarce thing, so we only do it when the length of the lot allows.

On a narrow lot, the side walls are for structure and storage, the end walls are for light, and anything in the middle has to borrow daylight from above.

Icon Projects Team

Where the stair goes

A staircase takes up a strip of floor on every level it touches. On a 7.66 metre wide house the question of where that strip sits decides the whole plan.

Our default on a narrow lot is a straight or switchback stair against one side wall, running front to back. That does three things at once. It keeps the stair out of the middle of the house, so the living space beside it is one long clear run. It puts the stair on the wall that was never going to have windows anyway. And it lines the stairwell up under the skylight described above, so the stair earns its floor space by delivering daylight.

A central stair, the kind that sits in the middle of the plan as a feature, works on a narrow lot only when it is open on all sides and the floors around it are open too, so the whole thing reads as one tall light well. Closed in, a central stair on a narrow lot turns the main floor into two small rooms with a box between them.

The staircase design post goes into the code minimums for width, headroom and guards. On a narrow lot the number that matters most is the stair's total run, because a long straight run along a side wall pushes the rooms at either end of it back toward the setbacks.

The garage goes to the lane

Where a Burnaby Heights or Capitol Hill lot backs onto a lane, and many do, the R1 district requires parking to be in an attached or detached garage, carport or parking pad at the rear of the lot when the lot is accessible from an abutting lane or street. Parking can sit elsewhere only where there is no direct access to the rear, or the City's General Manager Engineering is satisfied that rear access is not feasible because of an extreme grade.

On a narrow lot that is the rule working in your favour. A front garage on a 33-foot lot eats most of the street elevation and drops a driveway across the front yard. A lane garage gives the entire front of the house back to the living room and its windows, and the lane yard setback of 1.5 metres lets the garage sit close to the back line.

The City also asks for a topographical survey and a proposed driveway drawing at the Engineering pre-application stage, before the building permit, on its New Home Construction page. On a lane lot the driveway drawing is the lane crossing, and it is worth getting right early because the grade between the lane and the garage slab is often the one part of a narrow lot that has any slope at all.

A detached garage at the lane also leaves room for a coach house above it later, since the R1 district allows a rear principal building, which is worth keeping in mind even if the first build is a single house.

How the plan changes when the house is long

On a wide suburban lot in Coquitlam or Langley the rooms sit side by side across the house, each with an outside wall and its own window. On a narrow Burnaby lot they line up front to back, and the plan becomes a sequence rather than a spread.

The sequence we use most often on a three-storey narrow lot house runs like this. Living room at the street, with the full-width front glazing. Stair and powder room along one side wall. Kitchen and dining in the middle, lit by the stair skylight and a clerestory band. Family room and the big glass at the back, opening to the yard. Bedrooms upstairs in the same order, with the primary suite at the back for the quiet and the view, and the kids at the front. Basement below with the window wells on the long walls.

A few habits that come with that shape:

• The hallway has to earn its width. A corridor down one side of a narrow house is dead floor area. We line it with storage, put the powder room off it, and open it to the rooms beside it where privacy allows, so it reads as part of the space rather than a tube.
• Ceiling height replaces width. When a room cannot be wide, it can be tall. A raised ceiling at the back of the main floor, where the big glass is, makes a 7 metre wide room feel far larger than its plan suggests.
• Services stack on the side wall. Bathrooms, laundry and mechanical line up on the same side of the house on every floor, above one another, so the plumbing runs short and the good wall stays clear for living.
• Doors slide rather than swing. Pocket and barn doors save the swing arc in rooms that have no width to give.

None of this makes a narrow lot feel like a wide one, and it should not try to. The best long, thin houses we have built in the Heights feel like what they are: a bright sequence of rooms from the street to the yard, with daylight falling down the middle and the garage out of sight on the lane. Get the setback arithmetic done first, put the glass on the two ends, and spend the design hours on where the light comes from.

Frequently asked questions

What is the side yard setback for a house on a narrow lot in Burnaby?

Under the R1 Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing District in the current Burnaby Zoning Bylaw, the interior side yard setback is 1.2 metres for a small-scale multi-unit lot, and the same 1.2 metres applies to the end unit of a rowhouse. On a 33-foot lot that leaves 7.66 metres of width between the setback lines. Confirm the setbacks for your own lot in the R1 district text on burnaby.ca before you commit to a plan.

Can you build a custom home on a 33-foot lot in Burnaby Heights?

Yes. A 33-foot lot is 10.06 metres wide, which clears the 10 metre minimum lot width that Burnaby's R1 district sets for a small-scale multi-unit lot. The house will be long and thin, so the design work goes into where the daylight comes from, where the stair sits and how you reach the garage.

How do you get daylight into the middle of a narrow house in Burnaby?

From above. On a narrow lot the side walls face a neighbour a few metres away, so we put the big glazing on the front and back and bring light into the centre of the plan with a skylight or a light well over the stair, a clerestory row high on a side wall, or a small courtyard cut into the plan. Burnaby's R1 district also allows window wells to a basement within set limits, which keeps a lower floor from going dark.

Where should the staircase go in a long, narrow custom home?

Against one side wall, running front to back, in most of our narrow-lot plans. That keeps the stair out of the middle of the house, leaves one long clear run of living space beside it, and turns the stairwell into a light shaft if a skylight sits above it. A central stair only works on a narrow lot when it is open and doubles as the light well.

Does a Burnaby house on a lane have to put the garage at the back?

The R1 district requires parking in a garage, carport or parking pad at the rear of the lot when the lot can be reached from an abutting lane or street. Parking can go elsewhere only where there is no direct access to the rear, or the City's General Manager Engineering agrees rear access is not feasible because of an extreme grade. On a narrow lot this is good news, because it frees the whole street frontage for living space.

How close to the side property line can a window well be in Burnaby?

The R1 district lets the ground beside a building be lowered for basement windows without affecting the height calculation, provided the window wells extend no more than 0.9 metres from the building, extend no more than 0.75 metres into a required side yard, and run no longer than 25 percent of the length of that wall. We size the wells to those limits at the design stage so the basement bedroom gets a real window.

What is the minimum lot width for a new house in Burnaby?

Burnaby's R1 district sets a 10 metre minimum lot width for a small-scale multi-unit lot on an interior lot, and the same 10 metres on a corner lot. Rowhouse lots are narrower, at 5 metres, or 6.2 metres for an end unit. On pie-shaped or irregular lots the frontage can be less than the minimum if the average width over the first 30 metres of depth still meets it.

How does a narrow Burnaby lot change the floor plan compared with a wide lot in Coquitlam?

On a wide suburban lot in Coquitlam the rooms can sit side by side across the house, each with its own outside wall. On a narrow Burnaby lot the rooms line up front to back, so the plan becomes a sequence: living at the street, kitchen and dining in the middle, family room and glass at the back, with the stair and services along one side. The middle rooms need light from above, and the hallway has to earn its width by doing double duty.