24 ms·

The Case for Rooms

269 points by joeyespo 7y ago

pacaro 7y ago
My parents live in a house built in 1840 (in the UK so this isn’t too unusual) and I grew up being continually told to close doors (every room is separated from connected rooms by doors) to conserve heat and, particularly importantly for the kitchen, to stop the house smelling of cooking. All the homes I’ve lived in as an adult (mostly in the US) haven’t had the same separation and I like when my house smells of cooking (as long as I don’t burn something) but it definitely changes what I cook, knowing that the oven will heat the entire apartment definitely changes plans in the summer, whereas my mother can simply open the kitchen door
- bluedino 7y ago
  My biggest part of having an open floor plan is grease finds it's way from the kitchen to the living room to coat the TV
  - lutorm 7y ago
    There's an existing solution to that: the "range hood".
diminish 7y ago
I have a lot of clients. The ones with separate rooms are especially inefficient, in that teams seldom see each other and organize long meetings to compensate. So separate rooms are equal to "remote" work for all practical purposes. At the end, "remote" teams with monthly get-togethers and weekly calls are best IMHO.
- c0nsumer 7y ago
  Did you read the article? This is about history of and changes to places that people live in, not open-plan vs. separate-office workplaces.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    But death to the open-office floor plan, too.
  - fullshark 7y ago
    I admit I knee-jerk upvoted without reading at first because I hate open office floor plans so much.
- amf12 7y ago
  Did you read the article? It's talking about the new modern open living plans with no walls between kitchen and the living room.
- cracauer 7y ago
  [nm]
ljm 7y ago
It has to be a mix. Fully open isn’t great because you can’t make your space your own. You have to consider the entire rest of the floor or building. Give everyone private rooms and everyone works in isolation. This might look productive but I would argue it’s not: everyone has a physical barrier around themselves, they don’t even need to set boundaries any more. But if you can give your teams a group space to themselves, they get the benefit of an open collaborative space between them without polluting the dynamics of other teams. Rather than one open space, create that hotdesking area, then your large team rooms, and then scatter your generic meeting rooms and video call booths around so you can still opt for privacy. This takes more effort but it is worth it. Your teams will generate subcultures of their own to make it easier (and more enjoyable) to work together. Give them that space.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  What teams? The article is about homes.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    Maybe the dude is onto something. In the future we won't think of families as families, but as teams, all highly engaged and aligned on a single strategic goal.
- ljm 7y ago
  My mistake... I made the classic mistake of reading the headline, the parent comment, and not the content. This is usually called a conversation. Enjoy your free downvotes down the thread.
  - mynameisvlad 7y ago
    > This is usually called a conversation. You didn't even reply to said parent comment, so I don't see how "conversation" is your excuse. Maybe next time you're proven wrong, you don't dig with renewed fervor and snark and instead only humbly admit your mistakes.
  - 7y ago
neogodless 7y ago
Most of this was historical in nature, which is fine but largely uninteresting to me at the moment. But I did perk up when I recognized one of the issues highlighted by an open floor plan in your home - noises not being contained to one area. For example, trying to watch TV while someone wants to get something done in the kitchen. My spouse and I do this to each other all the time. Someone wants to grind coffee, grab a snack or wash some dishes, but it makes hearing the precious TV so much harder!
- Animats 7y ago
  This has been one of the motivations for making kitchen appliances quieter. Quieter dishwashers and garbage disposals are a thing.
- rootsofallevil 7y ago
  It never use to bother me, perhaps because we didn't have a TV for so long, so watching a movie or a TV episode was a bit of an event: Power Up Modem, Power up old PC, load Chrome, Fire up Netflix and a good 2 minutes had elapsed. Now that we have a TV and still only watch Netflix or Youtube but because it's so easy I find myself watching stuff almost like a TV and get really annoyed when there is noise coming from the kitchen.
Animats 7y ago
Maybe this will spread to office spaces.
alkonaut 7y ago
The open (Kitchen) floor plan to me represents the idea that cooking isn’t a chore separate from eating and socializing. I want to cook for an hour without being alone. Privacy in the kitchen would never be desireable. “Entertaining” doesn’t require guests. 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.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  Why not both? Personally, a combined cooking/living space is desirable for exactly the reasons you mentioned. However a separate dining room, and perhaps another room for "entertaining" (think a "den" or similar room) is also desirable to me.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Open floor plans make better and worse use of space. One space can serve many functions, so that's a gain. But when you eliminate a wall, you eliminate a place to put bookcases and such. One of the rules in making the most of a small space is "go vertical". Walls help you do that. So that's a loss for open plans.
  - eropple 7y ago
    I kinda like half-height bookshelves and the like to create partitions without losing that sense of openness. In our new place I'm putting a set of half-height cabinets behind the couch to partition off the "living area" from the kitchen/dining area.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    You can put up shelves in the middle of an open space. I've done that before to divide a finished basement room into "office" and "bedroom" sections. I'm a big fan of double-sided shelves like the Ikea Expedit/Kallax lines, but anything will do. Open space gives you the option of dividing it up as you like. A fixed wall makes the decision for you.
joker3 7y ago
It'll be fun to watch this one and see all the discussion about open plan offices from people who didn't read the article.
- Cd00d 7y ago
  And the comments boil down to: "I have strong opinions but avoided what looked like an opportunity to become more informed".
  - ninth_ant 7y ago
    Informed about what exactly? The TL;DR: of the article is "open house plans are bad because smells and noise travels throughout the floor" plus a whole lot of history and fluff. If the article was about the history of floor plans and the origin of the open floor plan, sure that's a chance to be informed. But it nominally wasn't.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Yea I was disappointed when I saw it was talking about houses. I've seen a lot of cookie-cutter houses have very open plans just to give the illusion of having more space. I actually like them (if they're setup like a tri-level). Open plan offices are garbage. You have totally different goals/requirements for each.
  - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
    As stated in other comments, the part of an open-plan house that has rooms has the rooms where privacy and quiet are valuable. The part that is not divided is the social space. When engineers say they like open offices, I assume they prefer to be able to socialize (consult) with their nearby peers more than they prefer to have quiet. Those who prefer private offices prefer quiet and no interruptions. So all of this is consistent between homes and offices.
madengr 7y ago
The open floor plan is nice if you have small kids that need to be watched over. Though as they get older, it’s nicer to have separate rooms. 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.
jpm_sd 7y ago
The historical context portion of the article is interesting and well written, but the critique of the open-concept layout at the end seemed rushed and unconvincing. Anyone here who lives in a modern open-concept house care to comment? I currently live with my wife, 3 children and 2 dogs in a 1200 square foot split level and we all dream of a big open-concept house some day... but apparently some people are getting tired of theirs and adding walls back in? https://www.philly.com/philly/news/open-floor-plan-fixer-upper-hgtv-real-estate-trend-new-construction-townhouses-hybrid-20180913.html https://www.philly.com/philly/news/open-floor-plan-fixer-upp... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/realestate/im-over-open-concept-design.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/realestate/im-over-open-c...
- eropple 7y ago
  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!)
- aetherson 7y ago
  I live in a house with an open plan and the author of that article couldn't be more wrong about my preferences. An open concept is key to making a house usable to me. 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.
matz1 7y ago
why not have both and also allow remote ? let the employee decide which one they prefer.
- privong 7y ago
  > why not have both and also allow remote ? let the employee decide which one they prefer. The article is about home floor plans, not business offices.
cracauer 7y ago
[nm]
- kylec 7y ago
  The article's about open-plan homes, not offices though
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
oflannabhra 7y ago
I don't really see rooms making a full recovery from the current open floor plan trend. While I agree that there are some downsides to an open floor plan (sound, cleaning, etc), I would be surprised if the open floor plan does not have serious longevity. Specifically, the open kitchen, which seems to be where the open floor plan started. Attitudes towards meal preparation have had significant changes over the past few decades, and given the changes to women's roles in society, I don't really see a potential to return to separate cooking and serving spaces. I wouldn't be surprised if the pendulum swings the other way soon, so that there is at least some compartmentalization of the first floor (kitchen, dining room, living room, entry, etc). But probably the dining room and kitchen will be that last to be divided, if ever.
- jerf 7y ago
  "While I agree that there are some downsides to an open floor plan (sound, cleaning, etc)" Sound could be mitigated at least somewhat if these rooms weren't so often hardwood floors, windows, and drywall on every surface. I'll cop to being at least somewhat above average on sensitivity to such things, but while a big space will always have a certain big space-y sound to it, it doesn't have to be a booming echo where the high-frequency sounds bounce around for seconds at a time.
  - tropo 7y ago
    I'd really like to suppress the sound. Doing that well is non-standard, and thus expensive. There are so many obvious fixes that introduce other problems. Textured surfaces like carpet and popcorn ceilings get filthy disgusting. Wooden walls and ceilings are a fire hazard. I think white silicone rubber would be an excellent surface material. It won't burn, nothing eats it, it won't rot, it can be scrubbed with bleach or detergent, and it can have the right sort of softness for absorbing sound. It could work as floor tiles or wall panels, with a smooth exposed surface and a waffle-like backing to grant it some additional squishyness. For the ceiling it could even be like stalactites, perhaps 4" diameter and 20" length, to better absorb the sound.
gabriel34 7y ago
The article touches upon but does not elaborate on one of the main reasons open designs grew in popularity: money. Increasing population density drives the cost per square meter up and having a dedicated home office, dining room, etc becomes too expensive. Sure you can have lots of rooms if you have the space, but try to cram a family of four in 50 square meters with all these environments and you end up with tiny rooms. A solution would be, as stated on the last paragraph, multi-purpose rooms (e.g. guest bedroom with office) Off topic: this article is like a fly trap for people who comment without reading the article.
pnw_hazor 7y ago
I love our 1989 built open great room plan. Though we never use the "formal" dining room or formal living room as intended. They are/were used for craft rooms, playrooms, exercise rooms, temp storage, office space, and so on over the years.
swagtricker 7y ago
Depending on your lifestyle, some areas are just a waste of space. It's just my wife, me, and two cats (children weren't in the cards) in a ~1000 sq/ft 2br/2ba condo. It's open concept built in the late 90's and when we look around on housing/remodel shows on TV or look at floor plans for our dream home (a whole 200 sq/ft larger with a pool) the #1 thing we kill off is the damn dining room. We eat in front of the TV or at the dining counter in the kitchen like normal 'Mericans. We don't need a whole separate room wasted w/ no door and a low hanging light fixture that we might make use of a few days a year.
- rconti 7y ago
  But the dining room is not inherent in an open concept, and it's not absent in closed spaces. If anything, I find the "useless" formal dining rooms tend to exist more often in their own separate totally pointless room, where open floor plans tend to have more "usable" everyday dining spaces. not that you couldn't thrown in 2 or 3 or 4 dining rooms if you really wanted to be wasteful.
projektfu 7y ago
I feel like Hackers probably don't really care about this topic, but they are excited to see a few get punked by the unexpected subject matter.
joshuaheard 7y ago
After just spending two months working with an architect to design the remodel our 6,000 sf house, here are my observations. We like to entertain. We usually have people over for some kind of party at least every month. During parties, people gather in the kitchen (for some reason). So we try to encourage people to get out of the kitchen. Pathways are important. Every common area should have at least two pathways, and dead-end rooms should be avoided. The easiest way to accomplish all of these is the open concept floor plan with the kitchen at the center. Now, with folding exterior doors, the open concept is moving outdoors to create indoor/outdoor spaces. So, actually, the trend is going towards even more open concept floor plans.
- lutorm 7y ago
  With a 6000 sf house, surely you have enough space to have both open and closed off parts of the house?
  - joshuaheard 7y ago
    The private spaces are closed off, of course. But, the floor plan has a few large rooms, not many small rooms that could be closed off. One could do it that way, I presume.
hateful 7y ago
I'd say it's very good if your filming a TV sitcom. I wonder if that's where the appeal originated?
- tzakrajs 7y ago
  I like how you think
rdtsc 7y ago
I have seen the tension between open separated spaces with my family. My parents come from a place and time when having lots of little rooms, with doors that you can open close is a great advantage. My wife and I like open floor plans. The kitchen opens into the living room and into the dining room. When my parents visit, my mom often remarks how she would really like to close the (non-existent) door to the kitchen, so she can cook in peace and not make loud noises and smell up the whole house. And we keep trying to tell her that we like to watch and help her cook, see steaming pot of soup or the frying pan going and whatnot. It's a silly conversation we have, we even joke about it, but I found it relevant with the article at hand. > the kitchen, no longer a place of shame and no longer reliant upon the ventilation provided by the kitchen door Yes. I think that is to some extent how my mom views that space. It's a dirty, place that you want isolate, do your work in there, and then come out and serve everyone the food in the dining room.
- ksdale 7y ago
  We had a very similar experience! My grandfather and his lady-friend came over to see our new house, remarked on how much space there was, and proceeded to spend the rest of the visit making little remarks about how to better separate the parts of the house from each other. They seemed completely oblivious to the fact that we bought the house specifically because it was so open.
cleandreams 7y ago
I live in a old Victorian with small rooms and solid wood doors. This was fantastic when my son was growing up and when my wife was alive. Her tv watching noise did not take over the house; no one's did. It was great. One room is big, the dining room, where we all gathered. The kitchen was nice size too. I have to really appreciate this floor plan, plus the solid wood doors. I am noise sensitive.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
This really seems like an extended "stop liking what I don't like" rant. There are legitimate reasons to prefer either open or closed kitchens, and most of them come down to personal preference. Personally, I like being in open, airy spaces. It's got nothing to do with "entertaining." Also, this: > A large, single, continuous space is harder to get and keep clean. Messes and smells are no longer isolated, but can be easily tracked throughout the entire first floor of a large home. Less house in general means less house to clean. ...What? Sure, more walls make it easier to ignore messes, but that's not the same thing as easier to clean.
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  It's easier to sweep four small rooms than one big room without. With a big room I usually mentally break it into smaller sections to sweep one at a time, so as to always have a pile nearby whichever bit of floor is currently being swept, and then inevitably some of the dust from one section blows into somewhere I'd already finished. If the small rooms have thresholds, that helps too; that's what they're for. Also you can do one room today and the next tomorrow; that holds for vacuuming as well as sweeping.
- viburnum 7y ago
  The same author makes the case for criticism in this article https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/dont-let-people-enjoy-things-wagner https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/dont-let-people-enjoy-thin...
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    That's kind of ironic, actually. Here she's telling us to be more tolerant of other people's preferences, but in the OP article, she's basically saying "my preference is objectively correct, and if you disagree you must not understand the situation."
Someone1234 7y ago
Building or converting homes to the open plan style is long term advantageous. Traditional-roomed homes had load-bearing walls within the interior space. This limited your flexibility to make layout changes. Open plan buildings come with load-bearing beams spanning between exterior walls, meaning that all interior walls are purely for aesthetics or function reasons, and can be almost trivially changed. This is why modern office buildings have large open plan spaces with pillars. It is super flexible to set up walls (or not) as the space needs. Conference rooms? Private offices? Break-room? Closet? Just tell them where to put the prefab walls. If you're worried about being in vogue with house layout trends, open plan is the most logical place to begin because rooming off is cheaper than the other way around.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
And here I thought it was going to be about office space :-) More seriously though, the original open floor plan was the tipi or the igloo. Separate rooms for everything was explicitly a way to show off wealth by having portions of your living space dedicated to non-essential activities. When people put aside the bragging aspects having multiple rooms, it is more functionally useful to have a larger open space which can be configured dynamically for different activities. The discussion of the kitchen is fairly reasonable. The kitchen is a functional room and not something you generally use for other things (or at least the part with all the appliances). Most people don't share their garage either as its a functional storage space for their car (or excess possessions depending on how see things :)). A kitchenette (just a few preparation tools and one preparation area) certainly works well sharing the space with other things where people gather and snack, but kitchens with giant Wolf ranges, extended racks of cookware, and more stainless steel than a battleship are a bit out of place. I think those go back to showing off wealth rather than being practical :-)
- ip26 7y ago
  Rooms probably were about wealth originally, but walls have a lot of nice features.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
profreez 7y ago
I find it interesting that the open kitchen and living area has become so popular during the past few decades. Back in the says, rich families had servants cooking for them, so those kitchens would be very detached from the living area. After the Second World War, when many families couldn't afford servants anymore, the invention of the Frankfurt kitchen brought formed our modern understanding of kitchens and cooking: "We’re used to thinking of kitchens as a universal kind of room that almost everyone has—as essential as a place to sleep, or a bathroom. Our great-great-grandparents were not." https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/modern-kitchen-history-design-ideas-domestic-architecture/586345/ https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/modern-kitchen-histor...
mattnewton 7y ago
I found myself disagreeing with almost every point. Entertaining only happens a handful of times a year? What? Furthermore designing for it is wasteful? Why must it be? It’s an acoustic nightmare to have one big room that everyone can talk to in? Open floor plan housing makes smaller spaces feel larger by allowing all the rooms to be the living room or dining room as need be. It allows me to afford a place that feels larger but is smaller. And that alone is a killer feature in a City.
- rconti 7y ago
  I think it was basically a "spending hundreds of thousands to remodel your mansion to have a massive open floorplan just to show off to your friends makes me angry" rant that had nothing to do with how actual people use actual spaces. We almost never have people over, but having an open space is wonderful even for just two of us, and there's certainly nothing wasteful about designing for edge cases if they don't make things worse the rest of the time.
- TomVDB 7y ago
  While I love living in an open concept house, I totally agree with the points that you disagree with. We don't have a lot of guests all that often, so I agree if "a handful of times" is "between 10 and 15 per year." There is no question that open concept doesn't allow to heat or cool this room but not the other. It's all or nothing for us. That was totally different when I grew up. Whatever happens in the kitchen, we can hear it perfectly on the other side of the house in our bedroom if we leave our bedroom door open. That would not be the case if we had some kitchen door somewhere in between. Similarly, when our daughter has friends over in the dining area or living area, we typically move to the bedroom because the family/TV room is too noisy then.
rconti 7y ago
This article is a train-wreck of a justification for, I assume, the author's own personal taste in interior design. It builds up a total straw man for why open concepts are terrible, built on ways in which almost none of us actually live. What are the justifications for why "open concept" floor plans in which the kitchen flows into the living area? * Open floor plans are an "acoustic nightmare". Try to imagine the horror of trying to watch television in the living room while some jerk in the kitchen bangs pots and pans trying to get your Totino's Pizza Rolls ready for you. This point is at least fair. Yes, sound bleeds from one space to another, for better or for worse. But I don't want to live in a walled-off Victorian house. I don't have servants making me food. I don't have or want a partner who toils in some distant secluded space to make me my supper. When I'm cooking, I don't want to be isolated from 'the rest of the house'. I want to see the score in the game, or be able to talk to my partner as she unwinds after a long day, if I'm putting the dishes away. * "Designing homes around “entertaining” that happens only a handful of times a year is a wasteful, yet still mindbogglingly popular practice. When people come to visit, they are there to see you, not your open concept." But my open space allows me to communicate with my partner. Or have our parents over and speak with them while we prepare. Or, when we have "handful of times a year" parties, where people end up congregating in the kitchen ANYWAY, we're able to mingle and move freely. Moreover, the statement "they are there to see you, not your open concept" betrays an open hostility that the author clearly feels about WHY people design their spaces the way they do, that you're trying to show off, not that you could possibly PREFER to have spaces that blend together. * We are now apparently building "mess kitchens" so that our fancy designer kitchens don't get messy. Okay, but very few of us are rich enough to do this, go complain about those people doing that thing. * Things are too far apart in an open concept! We have to install 2nd "pot sinks" so that our commute between the sink and the stove is not excessive! Everything is so far apart! Again, rich people problems. Not open concept problems. Stuff can still be close together in an open space. Is the author complaining about the open concept, or the fact that some houses have kitchens marginally larger than an NYC efficiency kitchen you can't even turn around in? * Heating and cooling such a large space is so inefficient! Okay, because everyone WITHOUT an open concept has spaces that are easy to heat/cool separately? AFAIK most people use forced air or radiators or something, and don't really have the ability to heat one room at a time anyway. * We're building these absurd she-sheds and man-caves as rebellion against the open concept! ... so you're admitting that the open-concept only refers to the kitchen and dining and living room, and despite this people still have their private spaces and it basically works just fine for everyone? You also recognize, again, that the open concept does not and has not ever extended to bedrooms or offices or other living spaces? The article almost feels like a parody, since its example of a gloriously convenient 50s kitchen includes a washing machine and dryer and 1950s housewife who, conveniently, never needs to leave her unpaid working environment, or, for that matter, be seen at all.
sudosteph 7y ago
I don't think that closed kitchens are going to be making a return any time soon. If anything, the "mess kitchen" trend the author described just seems to be a way for very wealthy people to keep their open concept while having a classier alternative to the classic garage-fridge setup for overflow. As for all the concerns about noise making it hard to watch TV - on the rare occasions that it's a problem, I usually just turn captions on (which I usually keep on anyhow because I just find them helpful). The one space I do wish was standard in more homes though is a small office or library space. I would gladly replace most dining spaces (I don't even own a table to eat at) with a little corner room with doors and shelving on the walls.
arthurofbabylon 7y ago
I’m all for rooms - separation of space is effective for deliberately altering one’s state of mind, after all. However, the author’s argument was weak. Someone else or some other perspective really deserves to have written this piece.
lutorm 7y ago
"The closed floor plan, especially the closed kitchen, can help save energy by the simple principle of not heating and cooling rooms that are not currently in use, as well as by isolating rooms we want to keep warm or cool." This definitely depends on where you live. Here in Hawaii, an open floor plan is crucial for the natural breezes to be able to flow through the house. Fail that part, and you're stuck with totally closing up and air conditioning your house, which at $0.35/kWh really hurts. Plus why live in Hawaii if you're going to close yourself into an air tight box?
purplezooey 7y ago
I'm glad the article talks about houses too. Seems like everyone wants a house with one gigantic room on the first floor. No thanks.

269 points by joeyespo 7y ago

My parents live in a house built in 1840 (in the UK so this isn’t too unusual) and I grew up being continually told to close doors (every room is separated from connected rooms by doors) to conserve heat and, particularly importantly for the kitchen, to stop the house smelling of cooking. All the homes I’ve lived in as an adult (mostly in the US) haven’t had the same separation and I like when my house smells of cooking (as long as I don’t burn something) but it definitely changes what I cook, knowing that the oven will heat the entire apartment definitely changes plans in the summer, whereas my mother can simply open the kitchen door

bluedino 7y ago
My biggest part of having an open floor plan is grease finds it's way from the kitchen to the living room to coat the TV
- lutorm 7y ago
  There's an existing solution to that: the "range hood".

diminish 7y ago

I have a lot of clients. The ones with separate rooms are especially inefficient, in that teams seldom see each other and organize long meetings to compensate. So separate rooms are equal to "remote" work for all practical purposes. At the end, "remote" teams with monthly get-togethers and weekly calls are best IMHO.

c0nsumer 7y ago
Did you read the article? This is about history of and changes to places that people live in, not open-plan vs. separate-office workplaces.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  But death to the open-office floor plan, too.
- fullshark 7y ago
  I admit I knee-jerk upvoted without reading at first because I hate open office floor plans so much.
amf12 7y ago
Did you read the article? It's talking about the new modern open living plans with no walls between kitchen and the living room.
cracauer 7y ago
[nm]

ljm 7y ago

It has to be a mix. Fully open isn’t great because you can’t make your space your own. You have to consider the entire rest of the floor or building. Give everyone private rooms and everyone works in isolation. This might look productive but I would argue it’s not: everyone has a physical barrier around themselves, they don’t even need to set boundaries any more. But if you can give your teams a group space to themselves, they get the benefit of an open collaborative space between them without polluting the dynamics of other teams. Rather than one open space, create that hotdesking area, then your large team rooms, and then scatter your generic meeting rooms and video call booths around so you can still opt for privacy. This takes more effort but it is worth it. Your teams will generate subcultures of their own to make it easier (and more enjoyable) to work together. Give them that space.

zapzupnz 7y ago
What teams? The article is about homes.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Maybe the dude is onto something. In the future we won't think of families as families, but as teams, all highly engaged and aligned on a single strategic goal.
ljm 7y ago
My mistake... I made the classic mistake of reading the headline, the parent comment, and not the content. This is usually called a conversation. Enjoy your free downvotes down the thread.
- mynameisvlad 7y ago
  > This is usually called a conversation. You didn't even reply to said parent comment, so I don't see how "conversation" is your excuse. Maybe next time you're proven wrong, you don't dig with renewed fervor and snark and instead only humbly admit your mistakes.
- 7y ago

neogodless 7y ago

Most of this was historical in nature, which is fine but largely uninteresting to me at the moment. But I did perk up when I recognized one of the issues highlighted by an open floor plan in your home - noises not being contained to one area. For example, trying to watch TV while someone wants to get something done in the kitchen. My spouse and I do this to each other all the time. Someone wants to grind coffee, grab a snack or wash some dishes, but it makes hearing the precious TV so much harder!

Animats 7y ago
This has been one of the motivations for making kitchen appliances quieter. Quieter dishwashers and garbage disposals are a thing.
rootsofallevil 7y ago
It never use to bother me, perhaps because we didn't have a TV for so long, so watching a movie or a TV episode was a bit of an event: Power Up Modem, Power up old PC, load Chrome, Fire up Netflix and a good 2 minutes had elapsed. Now that we have a TV and still only watch Netflix or Youtube but because it's so easy I find myself watching stuff almost like a TV and get really annoyed when there is noise coming from the kitchen.

Animats 7y ago

Maybe this will spread to office spaces.

alkonaut 7y ago

The open (Kitchen) floor plan to me represents the idea that cooking isn’t a chore separate from eating and socializing. I want to cook for an hour without being alone. Privacy in the kitchen would never be desireable. “Entertaining” doesn’t require guests. 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.

nkrisc 7y ago
Why not both? Personally, a combined cooking/living space is desirable for exactly the reasons you mentioned. However a separate dining room, and perhaps another room for "entertaining" (think a "den" or similar room) is also desirable to me.
adrianmonk 7y ago
Open floor plans make better and worse use of space. One space can serve many functions, so that's a gain. But when you eliminate a wall, you eliminate a place to put bookcases and such. One of the rules in making the most of a small space is "go vertical". Walls help you do that. So that's a loss for open plans.
- eropple 7y ago
  I kinda like half-height bookshelves and the like to create partitions without losing that sense of openness. In our new place I'm putting a set of half-height cabinets behind the couch to partition off the "living area" from the kitchen/dining area.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  You can put up shelves in the middle of an open space. I've done that before to divide a finished basement room into "office" and "bedroom" sections. I'm a big fan of double-sided shelves like the Ikea Expedit/Kallax lines, but anything will do. Open space gives you the option of dividing it up as you like. A fixed wall makes the decision for you.

joker3 7y ago

It'll be fun to watch this one and see all the discussion about open plan offices from people who didn't read the article.

Cd00d 7y ago
And the comments boil down to: "I have strong opinions but avoided what looked like an opportunity to become more informed".
- ninth_ant 7y ago
  Informed about what exactly? The TL;DR: of the article is "open house plans are bad because smells and noise travels throughout the floor" plus a whole lot of history and fluff. If the article was about the history of floor plans and the origin of the open floor plan, sure that's a chance to be informed. But it nominally wasn't.
djsumdog 7y ago
Yea I was disappointed when I saw it was talking about houses. I've seen a lot of cookie-cutter houses have very open plans just to give the illusion of having more space. I actually like them (if they're setup like a tri-level). Open plan offices are garbage. You have totally different goals/requirements for each.
- cardiffspaceman 7y ago
  As stated in other comments, the part of an open-plan house that has rooms has the rooms where privacy and quiet are valuable. The part that is not divided is the social space. When engineers say they like open offices, I assume they prefer to be able to socialize (consult) with their nearby peers more than they prefer to have quiet. Those who prefer private offices prefer quiet and no interruptions. So all of this is consistent between homes and offices.

madengr 7y ago

The open floor plan is nice if you have small kids that need to be watched over. Though as they get older, it’s nicer to have separate rooms. 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.

jpm_sd 7y ago

The historical context portion of the article is interesting and well written, but the critique of the open-concept layout at the end seemed rushed and unconvincing. Anyone here who lives in a modern open-concept house care to comment? I currently live with my wife, 3 children and 2 dogs in a 1200 square foot split level and we all dream of a big open-concept house some day... but apparently some people are getting tired of theirs and adding walls back in? https://www.philly.com/philly/news/open-floor-plan-fixer-upper-hgtv-real-estate-trend-new-construction-townhouses-hybrid-20180913.html https://www.philly.com/philly/news/open-floor-plan-fixer-upp... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/realestate/im-over-open-concept-design.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/realestate/im-over-open-c...

eropple 7y ago
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!)
aetherson 7y ago
I live in a house with an open plan and the author of that article couldn't be more wrong about my preferences. An open concept is key to making a house usable to me. 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.

matz1 7y ago

why not have both and also allow remote ? let the employee decide which one they prefer.

privong 7y ago
> why not have both and also allow remote ? let the employee decide which one they prefer. The article is about home floor plans, not business offices.

cracauer 7y ago

[nm]

kylec 7y ago
The article's about open-plan homes, not offices though
deleted 7y ago
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oflannabhra 7y ago

I don't really see rooms making a full recovery from the current open floor plan trend. While I agree that there are some downsides to an open floor plan (sound, cleaning, etc), I would be surprised if the open floor plan does not have serious longevity. Specifically, the open kitchen, which seems to be where the open floor plan started. Attitudes towards meal preparation have had significant changes over the past few decades, and given the changes to women's roles in society, I don't really see a potential to return to separate cooking and serving spaces. I wouldn't be surprised if the pendulum swings the other way soon, so that there is at least some compartmentalization of the first floor (kitchen, dining room, living room, entry, etc). But probably the dining room and kitchen will be that last to be divided, if ever.

jerf 7y ago
"While I agree that there are some downsides to an open floor plan (sound, cleaning, etc)" Sound could be mitigated at least somewhat if these rooms weren't so often hardwood floors, windows, and drywall on every surface. I'll cop to being at least somewhat above average on sensitivity to such things, but while a big space will always have a certain big space-y sound to it, it doesn't have to be a booming echo where the high-frequency sounds bounce around for seconds at a time.
- tropo 7y ago
  I'd really like to suppress the sound. Doing that well is non-standard, and thus expensive. There are so many obvious fixes that introduce other problems. Textured surfaces like carpet and popcorn ceilings get filthy disgusting. Wooden walls and ceilings are a fire hazard. I think white silicone rubber would be an excellent surface material. It won't burn, nothing eats it, it won't rot, it can be scrubbed with bleach or detergent, and it can have the right sort of softness for absorbing sound. It could work as floor tiles or wall panels, with a smooth exposed surface and a waffle-like backing to grant it some additional squishyness. For the ceiling it could even be like stalactites, perhaps 4" diameter and 20" length, to better absorb the sound.

gabriel34 7y ago

The article touches upon but does not elaborate on one of the main reasons open designs grew in popularity: money. Increasing population density drives the cost per square meter up and having a dedicated home office, dining room, etc becomes too expensive. Sure you can have lots of rooms if you have the space, but try to cram a family of four in 50 square meters with all these environments and you end up with tiny rooms. A solution would be, as stated on the last paragraph, multi-purpose rooms (e.g. guest bedroom with office) Off topic: this article is like a fly trap for people who comment without reading the article.

pnw_hazor 7y ago

I love our 1989 built open great room plan. Though we never use the "formal" dining room or formal living room as intended. They are/were used for craft rooms, playrooms, exercise rooms, temp storage, office space, and so on over the years.

swagtricker 7y ago

Depending on your lifestyle, some areas are just a waste of space. It's just my wife, me, and two cats (children weren't in the cards) in a ~1000 sq/ft 2br/2ba condo. It's open concept built in the late 90's and when we look around on housing/remodel shows on TV or look at floor plans for our dream home (a whole 200 sq/ft larger with a pool) the #1 thing we kill off is the damn dining room. We eat in front of the TV or at the dining counter in the kitchen like normal 'Mericans. We don't need a whole separate room wasted w/ no door and a low hanging light fixture that we might make use of a few days a year.

rconti 7y ago
But the dining room is not inherent in an open concept, and it's not absent in closed spaces. If anything, I find the "useless" formal dining rooms tend to exist more often in their own separate totally pointless room, where open floor plans tend to have more "usable" everyday dining spaces. not that you couldn't thrown in 2 or 3 or 4 dining rooms if you really wanted to be wasteful.

projektfu 7y ago

I feel like Hackers probably don't really care about this topic, but they are excited to see a few get punked by the unexpected subject matter.

joshuaheard 7y ago

After just spending two months working with an architect to design the remodel our 6,000 sf house, here are my observations. We like to entertain. We usually have people over for some kind of party at least every month. During parties, people gather in the kitchen (for some reason). So we try to encourage people to get out of the kitchen. Pathways are important. Every common area should have at least two pathways, and dead-end rooms should be avoided. The easiest way to accomplish all of these is the open concept floor plan with the kitchen at the center. Now, with folding exterior doors, the open concept is moving outdoors to create indoor/outdoor spaces. So, actually, the trend is going towards even more open concept floor plans.

lutorm 7y ago
With a 6000 sf house, surely you have enough space to have both open and closed off parts of the house?
- joshuaheard 7y ago
  The private spaces are closed off, of course. But, the floor plan has a few large rooms, not many small rooms that could be closed off. One could do it that way, I presume.

hateful 7y ago

I'd say it's very good if your filming a TV sitcom. I wonder if that's where the appeal originated?

tzakrajs 7y ago
I like how you think

rdtsc 7y ago

I have seen the tension between open separated spaces with my family. My parents come from a place and time when having lots of little rooms, with doors that you can open close is a great advantage. My wife and I like open floor plans. The kitchen opens into the living room and into the dining room. When my parents visit, my mom often remarks how she would really like to close the (non-existent) door to the kitchen, so she can cook in peace and not make loud noises and smell up the whole house. And we keep trying to tell her that we like to watch and help her cook, see steaming pot of soup or the frying pan going and whatnot. It's a silly conversation we have, we even joke about it, but I found it relevant with the article at hand. > the kitchen, no longer a place of shame and no longer reliant upon the ventilation provided by the kitchen door Yes. I think that is to some extent how my mom views that space. It's a dirty, place that you want isolate, do your work in there, and then come out and serve everyone the food in the dining room.

ksdale 7y ago
We had a very similar experience! My grandfather and his lady-friend came over to see our new house, remarked on how much space there was, and proceeded to spend the rest of the visit making little remarks about how to better separate the parts of the house from each other. They seemed completely oblivious to the fact that we bought the house specifically because it was so open.

cleandreams 7y ago

I live in a old Victorian with small rooms and solid wood doors. This was fantastic when my son was growing up and when my wife was alive. Her tv watching noise did not take over the house; no one's did. It was great. One room is big, the dining room, where we all gathered. The kitchen was nice size too. I have to really appreciate this floor plan, plus the solid wood doors. I am noise sensitive.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

This really seems like an extended "stop liking what I don't like" rant. There are legitimate reasons to prefer either open or closed kitchens, and most of them come down to personal preference. Personally, I like being in open, airy spaces. It's got nothing to do with "entertaining." Also, this: > A large, single, continuous space is harder to get and keep clean. Messes and smells are no longer isolated, but can be easily tracked throughout the entire first floor of a large home. Less house in general means less house to clean. ...What? Sure, more walls make it easier to ignore messes, but that's not the same thing as easier to clean.

Qwertystop 7y ago
It's easier to sweep four small rooms than one big room without. With a big room I usually mentally break it into smaller sections to sweep one at a time, so as to always have a pile nearby whichever bit of floor is currently being swept, and then inevitably some of the dust from one section blows into somewhere I'd already finished. If the small rooms have thresholds, that helps too; that's what they're for. Also you can do one room today and the next tomorrow; that holds for vacuuming as well as sweeping.
viburnum 7y ago
The same author makes the case for criticism in this article https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/dont-let-people-enjoy-things-wagner https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/dont-let-people-enjoy-thin...
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  That's kind of ironic, actually. Here she's telling us to be more tolerant of other people's preferences, but in the OP article, she's basically saying "my preference is objectively correct, and if you disagree you must not understand the situation."

Someone1234 7y ago

Building or converting homes to the open plan style is long term advantageous. Traditional-roomed homes had load-bearing walls within the interior space. This limited your flexibility to make layout changes. Open plan buildings come with load-bearing beams spanning between exterior walls, meaning that all interior walls are purely for aesthetics or function reasons, and can be almost trivially changed. This is why modern office buildings have large open plan spaces with pillars. It is super flexible to set up walls (or not) as the space needs. Conference rooms? Private offices? Break-room? Closet? Just tell them where to put the prefab walls. If you're worried about being in vogue with house layout trends, open plan is the most logical place to begin because rooming off is cheaper than the other way around.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

And here I thought it was going to be about office space :-) More seriously though, the original open floor plan was the tipi or the igloo. Separate rooms for everything was explicitly a way to show off wealth by having portions of your living space dedicated to non-essential activities. When people put aside the bragging aspects having multiple rooms, it is more functionally useful to have a larger open space which can be configured dynamically for different activities. The discussion of the kitchen is fairly reasonable. The kitchen is a functional room and not something you generally use for other things (or at least the part with all the appliances). Most people don't share their garage either as its a functional storage space for their car (or excess possessions depending on how see things :)). A kitchenette (just a few preparation tools and one preparation area) certainly works well sharing the space with other things where people gather and snack, but kitchens with giant Wolf ranges, extended racks of cookware, and more stainless steel than a battleship are a bit out of place. I think those go back to showing off wealth rather than being practical :-)

ip26 7y ago
Rooms probably were about wealth originally, but walls have a lot of nice features.

deleted 7y ago

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profreez 7y ago

I find it interesting that the open kitchen and living area has become so popular during the past few decades. Back in the says, rich families had servants cooking for them, so those kitchens would be very detached from the living area. After the Second World War, when many families couldn't afford servants anymore, the invention of the Frankfurt kitchen brought formed our modern understanding of kitchens and cooking: "We’re used to thinking of kitchens as a universal kind of room that almost everyone has—as essential as a place to sleep, or a bathroom. Our great-great-grandparents were not." https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/modern-kitchen-history-design-ideas-domestic-architecture/586345/ https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/modern-kitchen-histor...

mattnewton 7y ago

I found myself disagreeing with almost every point. Entertaining only happens a handful of times a year? What? Furthermore designing for it is wasteful? Why must it be? It’s an acoustic nightmare to have one big room that everyone can talk to in? Open floor plan housing makes smaller spaces feel larger by allowing all the rooms to be the living room or dining room as need be. It allows me to afford a place that feels larger but is smaller. And that alone is a killer feature in a City.

rconti 7y ago
I think it was basically a "spending hundreds of thousands to remodel your mansion to have a massive open floorplan just to show off to your friends makes me angry" rant that had nothing to do with how actual people use actual spaces. We almost never have people over, but having an open space is wonderful even for just two of us, and there's certainly nothing wasteful about designing for edge cases if they don't make things worse the rest of the time.
TomVDB 7y ago
While I love living in an open concept house, I totally agree with the points that you disagree with. We don't have a lot of guests all that often, so I agree if "a handful of times" is "between 10 and 15 per year." There is no question that open concept doesn't allow to heat or cool this room but not the other. It's all or nothing for us. That was totally different when I grew up. Whatever happens in the kitchen, we can hear it perfectly on the other side of the house in our bedroom if we leave our bedroom door open. That would not be the case if we had some kitchen door somewhere in between. Similarly, when our daughter has friends over in the dining area or living area, we typically move to the bedroom because the family/TV room is too noisy then.

rconti 7y ago

This article is a train-wreck of a justification for, I assume, the author's own personal taste in interior design. It builds up a total straw man for why open concepts are terrible, built on ways in which almost none of us actually live. What are the justifications for why "open concept" floor plans in which the kitchen flows into the living area? * Open floor plans are an "acoustic nightmare". Try to imagine the horror of trying to watch television in the living room while some jerk in the kitchen bangs pots and pans trying to get your Totino's Pizza Rolls ready for you. This point is at least fair. Yes, sound bleeds from one space to another, for better or for worse. But I don't want to live in a walled-off Victorian house. I don't have servants making me food. I don't have or want a partner who toils in some distant secluded space to make me my supper. When I'm cooking, I don't want to be isolated from 'the rest of the house'. I want to see the score in the game, or be able to talk to my partner as she unwinds after a long day, if I'm putting the dishes away. * "Designing homes around “entertaining” that happens only a handful of times a year is a wasteful, yet still mindbogglingly popular practice. When people come to visit, they are there to see you, not your open concept." But my open space allows me to communicate with my partner. Or have our parents over and speak with them while we prepare. Or, when we have "handful of times a year" parties, where people end up congregating in the kitchen ANYWAY, we're able to mingle and move freely. Moreover, the statement "they are there to see you, not your open concept" betrays an open hostility that the author clearly feels about WHY people design their spaces the way they do, that you're trying to show off, not that you could possibly PREFER to have spaces that blend together. * We are now apparently building "mess kitchens" so that our fancy designer kitchens don't get messy. Okay, but very few of us are rich enough to do this, go complain about those people doing that thing. * Things are too far apart in an open concept! We have to install 2nd "pot sinks" so that our commute between the sink and the stove is not excessive! Everything is so far apart! Again, rich people problems. Not open concept problems. Stuff can still be close together in an open space. Is the author complaining about the open concept, or the fact that some houses have kitchens marginally larger than an NYC efficiency kitchen you can't even turn around in? * Heating and cooling such a large space is so inefficient! Okay, because everyone WITHOUT an open concept has spaces that are easy to heat/cool separately? AFAIK most people use forced air or radiators or something, and don't really have the ability to heat one room at a time anyway. * We're building these absurd she-sheds and man-caves as rebellion against the open concept! ... so you're admitting that the open-concept only refers to the kitchen and dining and living room, and despite this people still have their private spaces and it basically works just fine for everyone? You also recognize, again, that the open concept does not and has not ever extended to bedrooms or offices or other living spaces? The article almost feels like a parody, since its example of a gloriously convenient 50s kitchen includes a washing machine and dryer and 1950s housewife who, conveniently, never needs to leave her unpaid working environment, or, for that matter, be seen at all.

sudosteph 7y ago

I don't think that closed kitchens are going to be making a return any time soon. If anything, the "mess kitchen" trend the author described just seems to be a way for very wealthy people to keep their open concept while having a classier alternative to the classic garage-fridge setup for overflow. As for all the concerns about noise making it hard to watch TV - on the rare occasions that it's a problem, I usually just turn captions on (which I usually keep on anyhow because I just find them helpful). The one space I do wish was standard in more homes though is a small office or library space. I would gladly replace most dining spaces (I don't even own a table to eat at) with a little corner room with doors and shelving on the walls.

arthurofbabylon 7y ago

I’m all for rooms - separation of space is effective for deliberately altering one’s state of mind, after all. However, the author’s argument was weak. Someone else or some other perspective really deserves to have written this piece.

lutorm 7y ago

"The closed floor plan, especially the closed kitchen, can help save energy by the simple principle of not heating and cooling rooms that are not currently in use, as well as by isolating rooms we want to keep warm or cool." This definitely depends on where you live. Here in Hawaii, an open floor plan is crucial for the natural breezes to be able to flow through the house. Fail that part, and you're stuck with totally closing up and air conditioning your house, which at $0.35/kWh really hurts. Plus why live in Hawaii if you're going to close yourself into an air tight box?

purplezooey 7y ago

I'm glad the article talks about houses too. Seems like everyone wants a house with one gigantic room on the first floor. No thanks.