Our major complaint about every apartment we've ever lived in is that half the square footage is hidden in bedrooms no one ever spends time in. We have small children, and apartment buildings were generally quite reluctant to rent us less space than they thought we needed, but we generally chose apartments based on how big the living/kitchen area was. Given the choice between a 1,500 sq ft 2 bedroom with a 1,200 sq ft living room, and a 2,000 sq ft 4 bedroom with a 600 sq ft living room, we'll take the 2 bedroom all day, because we spend all of our time in the main space together, and we only sleep in the bedrooms. Having open space where we can all be together is massively important to our quality of life. (Naturally this will probably change as the kids get older...)

Somewhat related, when I was growing up, all of the families in our friend group tended to congregate at one family's house. They had the biggest house by far, but what I find funny in retrospect is that everyone's homes were laid out the same way, but the big house was SO much bigger, that even the compartmentalized rooms ended up feeling like an open floor plan.

People seem to subconsciously want a kitchen and a dining room and a sitting room and a living room like Downton Abbey, but they don't notice that each room in Downton Abbey is the size of a small gymnasium. At least from my perspective, it's better to have one room like that, than to try and cram all of the other rooms into a too small space.

Reading back over this, I realize I sound very opinionated, and I suppose that's because I am! Sometimes I go into a house and I just can't believe how someone could make a whole 2,000 sq ft feel so small and cramped.

There are two factors:

- Area / Perimeter ratio. If a room is too large, it's tough to use space efficiently. In open-concept rooms, there is limited space on the walls for traditional bookcases, art, buffet tables, etc. Of course you can still use the space, but you can usually fit more furniture when you have more walls (up to a point, then the inefficiency swings the other way).

- Privacy. Depending on how many people live in your house, a single large room may not offer enough privacy and noise exclusion as a day to day living space. Therefore, even if you have an open layout, you usually also want other more private and cozy rooms (e.g. a separate family room or den).

My conclusion is that an open layout is fine, but shouldn't be the be-all and end-all public living space in your home. If you have a 2k+ square foot house with an open layout and another separate living space, I think most people will be happy with that. For a single person/couple, having the extra living space might not be needed.

We ended up taking out all of the walls on the first floor to create a large kitchen/living/dining space and it feels so much larger and more pleasant than it did beforehand when there was a (small) kitchen, a (small) living room, and a (small) third room that was probably being used as a dining room. If you live somewhere where square footage is cheap--although, growing up in such a place, heating and air conditioning might not be!--I can see the appeal. But urban life puts some severe constraints on space and more open plans seems to make it more pleasant as well as more usable, at least for me. I don't know if I'd want to go back.

(Though, at the same time, I really value having an office with a door that I can close. That too is important!)

Consider a 3/3 with a kitchen, dining room and living room. For 4 people (two kids and two parents) you have 9 rooms, or a little over 2 per person.

This family would need to double their house size before maxing out.

Maybe the compromise is having rooms partitioned with French doors. My in-laws house (about 100 years old) is like that, but the shorter ceilings make me feel cramped.

Our house has an open kitchen + living room + entryway + stairway, and that's not so bad—because we also have a huge basement, four bedrooms for 2 adults + 3 kids, two extra rooms that are walled off with doors (we had to add the doors, though...), et c. So that open space is OK, because we have way more house than we'd need to be similarly-comfortable if it were better laid out, including having more walls and doors.

Media/theater rooms, library/study/office, formal dining room (probably a complete waste of space 90+% of the time, admittedly—I turned ours into the library/study), dedicated play room so the kids' shit doesn't take over the rest of the house (in smaller houses this may just be a second, less-public den/living-room area, probably mixed with the media room concept). Separate bedroom for each kid plus a spare bedroom if you can manage it—spare room, if present, may double as an office if space doesn't allow a dedicated room for that. Big bathrooms and closets that allow one's morning routine to be conducted entirely outside the bedroom proper (handy if partners don't wake up at the same time, plus makes tidying easier) and feature things like large tubs and big two-person showers. Entertaining spaces/bars, usually separated from the bedrooms as much as possible, probably mixed in with the media room/theater concept if space doesn't allow them to be separate. Exercise rooms. Those last two are often in a finished basement. Workshops. "In-law" suites (basically a 1-bedroom apartment), often in the basement. Usually several, but not all, of these things are present in a (by today's standards) mid-size or larger suburban house. Bigger houses may have all or almost all of them.

I've seen wine cellars (climate controlled, not legit caves) and steam/sauna rooms in houses that were large but not zomgwtf large, so those might be present in the middle-upper range of McMansions depending on the preferences of the owners.

Real monster houses that go beyond those may have mansionesque crap like ballrooms, elevators, indoor pools, et c., but then you're approaching or exceeding 7 figures even if the house is in the middle of no-where, so that's actually rich people with poor taste (or maybe they really do have large dance parties on the regular? Who knows. And indoor pool—I mean, if I could easily afford that, yeah, of course I'd like it) not middle-class people trying to imitate the rich.

Plus, remember, these giant houses usually have 3+ car attached garages (you'll have trouble selling a newly-constructed house with fewer than 2 garage bays in the US 'burbs these days—older houses sometimes have only one, or none, though) and maybe another bay around back if the basement is walk-out. Those make them look bigger than they are, as far as living space goes.

Not advocating/defending any of this, just providing an answer to the question :-)

The only area that was actually any use (for things like a lounge, office, etc) is the basement (a large open space that I split up with walls). All in all, I'd rather have less total square footage of floor space, and more wall space.

I feel like the downside I've noticed from contemporary design is lack of cupboard/storage and awkward layouts for couch/tv placement (many "staged houses" are impractical for living in--I hate decorative pillows). That might be exacerbated by larger, cheap TVs (but I remember this predating them). Maybe the lack of cupboard space is expected because people eat out more? Part of it is obviously knocking down walls gives fewer walls for cupboards, but I guess pantries are blown out to give more sqft to the main rooms?

My experience before the open floor plan trend was that there was a lot of bespoke rooms that weren't often used such as a dining room. I lived in places that had a separate living room and family room--but mostly the family gathered in one because the TV was there. Bedrooms have always been closed off. Things like a home office or gym were just extra bedrooms repurposed.

The personal space issue they're talking about seems like it would only apply to studio apartments or kids sharing rooms. I shared a room with my siblings and definitely remember feeling like I couldn't escape, but that didn't have anything to do with floor plans.

For example, when my siblings were kids we all lived in 1 house. I have 3 siblings so there were 6 of us including my parents. In 1 house.

As we graduated from college we moved out. Now there were 6 of us in 5 houses.

Beyond the raw house count, you're going to need more space. Multi-bedroom homes have shared common space. The house we grew up in had 1 dining room, 1 kitchen, 1 living room, 4 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms.

If we each moved out on our own, we now needed a minimum of 5 dining rooms, 5 kitchens, 5 living rooms, 5 bedrooms, and 5 bathrooms.

The number of people is the same. Still just 6. But we needed more housing and more space since we didn't share common space anymore. We didn't expect more than we had before (well, beyond the practicalities - it's difficult to share a bathroom with someone you don't live with), we expected the same as we had before we moved out.

Good things:

1. It is nice for entertaining.

2. Easier to keep an eye on children.

3. Flexibility to layout.

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Issues:

1. How often do you really entertain? Not counting family visits, way less often than you think.

2. You will always be on top of other people. Examples see [2a]

3. Less flexibility than you think, tables and chairs still have to go somewhere.

4. Nowadays it is extremely popular to put a half bath in the large space. I don't like listening to people potty, I don't like being listened to while I potty, and potty smells can linger.

5. Do you like to clean? People today don't just drop by like they used to, a shame really, but any time you think people might be coming by, even just to drop off a small item, the whole area needs to be picked up. When you have separate rooms, you can quickly pile things into that area that your visitors wont see, not so with open concept.

6. Surprise parties are now harder to pull off.

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[2a] - Say you have company down, and only want to talk to some of them, like when the women want to talk separate from the men. You want to do homework and have a quiet area. You want to read, your kids want to watch the same episode of Mickey Mouse Club House Again. You want to watch the big game, she wants to watch her "stories". You have two teenagers who like to fight for attention, can't separate them far enough with an open space.

Now, I do like it if it's not the case that my dirty dishes are literally the first thing you see from literally everywhere in the non-bedroom, non-bathroom parts of the house. Modern SF remodels often have a kitchen that has no separation of any kind from the living/dining areas, and that's not ideal. I am not a domestic god, I do often have mess in my kitchen.

But going from there to a fully walled-off kitchen, even if it has doorways instead of doors, is even worse. In any social event, someone is going to be in the kitchen some significant amount of time. Some significant amount of the time I spend just hanging out with my family is me cooking or cleaning in the kitchen. I don't want enforced isolation during those times.

Plus, a little nudge to not let mess pile up in your kitchen is a good thing.

In my ideal house, the kitchen is open to the living/dining across a wall or archway, but has its own nook that it retreats back into so that you can at least not have everything in the kitchen be front-and-center all the time.

Dining rooms per se are even worse than closed-off kitchens. They're a big waste of visual space. I am not Victorian, I do not have big formal sit-down dinner parties. Most of the entertaining or hanging-out space is the kitchen and living room, the dining room should be as fungible with that as possible.

There is also a matter of space. A shared living/dining/cooking space can use a lot less space than three separate rooms. I couldn’t afford the separate solution without it feeling cramped. In the open configuration it’s vast. The article mentions energy use - and living smaller is better in that regard.

Modern ones also do some really stupid stuff with square footage. One house we owned had a massive master suite the size of the entire 2-car garage (it was over it) plus some more carved out for the bathroom, but without any dividing walls or doors (even the [large] bathroom was just an open, wide doorway entry, no closing doors). It was huge, but also not quite big enough to divide into multiple spaces with furniture and rugs or whatever without it looking and feeling weird. A kind of awkward fake-luxury size. And it was a front-back split with a living room in the lower part alongside the entryway, with a fireplace and big window... the layout of which made it almost impossible to set up actual living room furniture in a decent way, so we basically didn't use that entire room and used the basement instead.

The house could have been a solid 500 sqft smaller and felt just as large, with some tweaks to the design. Nearly every other house we've owned, aside from one very old one (by American standards-1910s construction), had similar issues with large areas being wasted for one reason or another, due to how they were designed.

I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. Harder to furnish, and arrange furnishing properly, too (not enough wall space, more backs of things visible)

[EDIT] I'd actually liken the open-floorpan trend to the haphazard McMansion appearance of the outside of houses. One thing I've noticed looking at lots of houses over the years is that nice, big, older houses, or newer ones built with balanced and regular exterior layouts, tend to look smaller on the outside than they actually are—or, put differently, McMansion-style houses look much bigger than they actually are. They're loud, and deceptive. Open floor plans are like that for interior space.

Unfortunately, at least in our market, there's not much built in the last 20 years where the builders favored actual rooms instead of just one giant open public space. If you're lucky the basement's finished so maybe you get two of those.