Unit Number

The Unit Number is the companion to the Address Number and it exists because most people in cities do not occupy a whole building. Where an address has an apartment, unit, flat or suite designation, this position takes that inner number and reduces it in the usual way. Letters within it are converted through the same table the name positions use, so 4B gives four plus two.

Practitioners generally read the two together and give the unit the greater weight, on the reasoning that the reading is meant to describe the space actually lived in. The building's number is then treated as the wider setting: the character of the address as a whole, within which the individual dwelling has its own. A household in unit seven of a building numbered four is described as a private and reflective home inside a stable and work-oriented block, and the reading is built from the relation between the two.

Where there is no unit designation the position simply does not apply, and the chart is left without it rather than filled from somewhere else. That is worth noting, because most positions in this system can always be computed from a name or a date. Both of the place positions can be genuinely absent, and a practitioner who fills an absent one by substituting a floor number or a door number is making something up rather than following the method.

A unit number is assigned by a developer, a managing agent or a local authority, and what it records is usually the geometry of the building rather than anything about the dwelling. In most schemes the leading digit is the floor and the rest is the position along the corridor, so unit 703 is the third door on the seventh floor. Reduced, that gives ten and then one, and the reading attached to one is then offered as a description of the household.

Two consequences follow that a reader should hold in view. Identical dwellings stacked vertically get systematically different readings, because only the floor digit changes between them, and neighbouring dwellings on the same floor get readings that vary in an orderly sequence along the corridor. Whatever the numbers are describing, it varies with position in a building in a way the building's designers chose.

There is also the omission that runs through every scheme of this kind. Many buildings have no thirteenth floor, and in parts of East Asia no fourth, because the developer removed the number for exactly the sort of reason numerology is interested in. The unit numbers above the gap are therefore all shifted, and a dwelling physically on the thirteenth floor carries the number fourteen. A superstition about numbers has quietly altered the input to a system that reads numbers, and neither the practitioner nor the client is likely to notice.