The problem is that a lot of larger houses simply have larger rooms. For example, I have a the living room and dining room sharing a large rectangular space with a vaulted ceiling. Then, there is another rectangle which has the kitchen at one end, and a family room at the other (separated by a tile / carpet boundary, and a partial knee wall). So in effect I only have two rooms on the main floor. And the upper story has 3 bedrooms (two normal size, and a large master bedroom). But the master bedroom has too much wall space covered with windows, or interior doors, so there isn't much space to put furniture (but you have a lot of floor space in between).
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.
Having more rooms and more division between them is part of why older houses feel bigger to me.
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.
A lot of the open concept houses around here use enough space for four rooms for one big one. Usually kitchen + dining area + a single living room easily large enough to be two. If you're lucky you have one other room in the public area, designated by design as a dining room (distinct from the merely-yards-away dining area!), and if you're super lucky it's at least got three walls rather than just being designated by flooring and maybe like one pillar.
More rooms is nice if you don't like being on top of every single other person in the house all the time, without having to go to your bedroom (aren't we supposed to only go there for sleep, for sleep-hygiene reasons?) to escape. In recent houses this means using ~3x the space you actually need to accomplish that, mostly by adding a room or two in a finished basement, because the main public area's gigantic, yes, but also entirely open.
It's also very nice to be able to contain messes. So nice. One large shared living space plus kids means no part of your house ever doesn't look like shit without heroic efforts or paid help.
I couldn't agree more. I think a large part of the problem is the application of trends which make sense in large houses (and houses tend to be pretty big in much of the US) to smaller spaces. I grew up in a big house in flyover country and it had a "open concept" with a huge combined living room/kitchen/dining room. But that house also had a study and a "family room" on the first floor, and 5 bedrooms on the second, so everyone had plenty of private space. My current much smaller house in California is basically a shrunken version of the open concept. But it lacks the family room and study, and only has 3 bedrooms. Despite having ~ 1400 square feet, it feels cramped with only 2 adults and 1 child living in it.
I live in a 2100 square foot house and the living room, dining room, and kitchen are all the same giant room. We got the house mostly because of this room, because it allows us to keep tabs on our two little ones pretty easily. We don’t make great use of the other 1000 square feet. It was more an issue of “we want to live in this nice neighborhood” so we bought too much house. I really wish I could have bought a 1200 square footer in a safe neighborhood but where I live in flyover country that’s just not how it works.
It's interesting; growing up we had a 'great room' type large room setup, and we artificially divided it into a dining room and living room with furniture because doing without a dining room for holidays and guests was unthinkable, even if we didn't use it in every day dinners.
I guess the current owners of that house probably just enjoy the large room.
I can understand some level of space. I have a lot of equipment from my hobbies and basically nowhere to put it. An extra room would be nice.
At some point it doesn’t make sense. I knew two people, a couple, that owned a three story lake home with I couldn’t even count how many rooms. This was great once every few years when they had a big gathering, but would just feel eerily empty otherwise.
I would also add in the usable space (number of usable rooms). Many houses come with a formal dining room combined with a formal living room (often called the great room); they then have a family room that flows into the kitchen. Add in an oversized master bedroom, and you have quite a bit of square footage but not really anything you can do with it that you couldn't do with smaller houses.
We just bought a house, it was recently renovated and basically all of the walls in the kitchen/dining/living rooms were removed, and it sat on the market for a long time compared to similarly priced houses in the area. Based on location and everything else, the only thing we could conclude was that people don't like open floor plans as much as HGTV would lead us to believe, but it's awesome for us.
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's a limited amount of exterior wall space. If you give the bedrooms windows then that pushes the living space to the interior and makes it window less.
Or maybe you just make the floorplates smaller to increase the ratio of exterior walls to floor area like most residential buildings.
I was about to make the same comment. It's amazing how much the layout affects the usability of the space. I hate, hate, hate those huge master bathrooms and walk in closets because they eat space. Also common where I am: large hallways and entryways that could have been part of a room instead, and an open seating area at the top of the stairs. (What is that even for? Why not just make it an enclosed office. I don't want to hang out on a couch at the top of a stairway). Older 1300 sq ft houses often feel just as spacious as new construction that is 2000 sq ft because they have no wasted space.
I'm always torn about this. My girlfriend and I (no kids) just bought a 1050 sq. ft. house in a very dense area and the biggest problem with separate rooms/separate spaces is square footage--it's hard to do that without making it feel really cramped. And that's just with two of us and two dogs.
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!)
Make your kids share a room and limit how much crap they accumulate. My brother and I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with our parents and never felt cramped. (On the flip side, if you don't aggressively limit crap accumulation, a substantially larger home will feel small. Our house is about 2,800 square feet, and we're looking to finish the basement and add another 800 because everyone has too much crap.)
In terms of layout, big bedrooms and big bathrooms account for a lot of square footage but don't add much utility. Our main floor bathroom is the size of a small bedroom, and we got furniture in it so we could store some of our crap.
Because for a typical 3 bedroom house, you want about half the space to be bedrooms and half living/dining/kitchen area. If you put a bedroom downstairs, that means you have to put the living room upstairs. This is a big hassle if you have people over. Also by putting the bedrooms upstairs, you have a private space upstairs where guests don't usually go, so it doesn't have to be perfectly tidy when they come over.
My last house was quite a bit bigger than current one, but id didn't have any more space. Sure, the master bedroom was huge, but that just meant there was that much floor space to walk across to get from the bed to the bathroom. There was a "great room", which had a dining room table on one side (mostly unused, except to collect junk), and an empty living room on the other side. Separate family room adjoining the kitchen (knee wall separating them), where TV was. Only useful feature was a full sized basement (which collected a bunch of junk), and 2 full baths upstairs.
Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
We do have another room, that's slightly larger but it's a bit bleak. And weirdly it's a more fussy room to furnish. The smaller size is better in the winter. The old brick terraces aren't that warm. In large houses people can gravitate to smaller rooms for that reason. Personally I'd like a large room that I could bring the furniture in from the sides. Lucky to even have a house to live in to be honest, so can't really grumble.
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.
reply