Why Open Plan Living is Still a Must-Have

Is open plan living still popular? At Hopkins Homes, we’re finding an increasing number of our customers looking specifically for these family-friendly, sociable spaces. Here’s why open plan living is the perfect design for today’s households.

The Evolution of Open Plan Living

In the past, most of us would have lived in an open-plan home, a simple dwelling where everyone (and that could include the livestock) ate, cooked, slept and socialised in a single room. Crowded yes – but also safe and warm. The idea of personal privacy is a relatively new one, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that walls started to go up inside smaller homes. How have we ended up with open plan homes again?

The Journey to Modern Homes

Many floorplans still follow the basic Georgian home design: separate sitting and dining rooms with the kitchen kept firmly to the rear of the building and the bedrooms upstairs. Smaller rooms not only afforded privacy, they were easier to heat, and the back-breaking, messy labour of laundry and food preparation was safely hidden.

So, what changed? A combination of technology and social attitudes led to a return to larger, single spaces. Central heating meant that we weren’t relying on open fireplaces to heat small rooms, and labour-saving appliances like washing machines and ovens made daily domestic tasks easier and neater.

We also became less formal. Messy elements of everyday life, from dirty dishes to noisy children, were no longer seen as things to be hidden away. The housewife became more of a hostess and less of a domestic servant, so was no longer segregated from her guests in the kitchen during dinner parties.

US architect Frank Lloyd Wright began to design open-plan living spaces in the 1950s. A central open fireplace (reminiscent of those in ancient round houses, but with better ventilation) was often used to create a division between zones, a feature that remained popular up until the 1970s. Today, you’re more likely to see a breakfast bar or kitchen island unit acting as a divider.

Unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to sleep, wash and dress in our open-plan space. However, most daytime activities, from cooking to coffee breaks, working to watching TV, all take place in the same, large room.

The Three Key Benefits of Open Plan Living

Why is open plan living so popular? Here are some of the reasons why people opt for this modern home design layout.

Enhancing Social Interaction

From morning coffee to full-on dinner parties, the hosts are no longer confined to a separate kitchen. Entertaining guests has become far less formal over the last few decades, and these social spaces are perfect for people who love company and cooking.

Multifunctional Spaces

When people talk about “family-friendly homes”, they’re often referring to an open plan layout. This design is especially handy when you have younger children, as you can easily watch them while you prepare a meal, and it’s lovely for everyone to hang out together. The central island unit or dining table takes on the role of the old farmhouse kitchen where everyone gravitates to eat, chat, do homework, make crafts, and puzzle over jigsaws, to name but a few.

Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Connection

Many modern open plan rooms have large windows that lead into the garden or patio, or a balcony or Juliet if it’s an upper-floor room. This creates a far better connection with the outdoors than the conventional “back door” garden access that older properties often have. Open plan spaces are often lighter, too, because they have windows on at least two sides.

Overcoming Potential Drawbacks

But what about the drawbacks to open plan living? As with every house design, there are bound to be some elements you find preferable to others; however, there are solutions to most open plan living concerns.

Heating Solutions

Our Georgian forebears were absolutely correct when they chose to have smaller rooms for easier heating. However, so were our medieval ancestors when they heated only one space. One of the criticisms of open plan living is that a large room is trickier to keep warm than a smaller one, especially if you have a New York loft-style space or live in a converted farm building like a barn.

Underfloor heating provides an excellent energy-efficient solution for larger rooms, as the heat isn’t simply rising straight from the radiators to the beams. If you’re having a multi-burner installed, modern editions will give you a heat-per-square-meter projection, so you can work out what size you need to heat the largest amount of space. Finally, as the old bothy dwellers knew, everyday tasks like cooking help to keep the room warm.

Privacy Options

When the children are small, being able to keep an eye on them is a real benefit of open plan living. When they’re teenagers, less so. Also, post-pandemic, many more of us are working from home and need a quieter space for all those Teams meetings. Thanks to on-line streaming, there’s a good chance that everyone wants to watch or listen to something separately, and it’s increasingly rare for the whole family to settle down in front of the same screen.

The solution is to have a smaller separate room as a study or den. Some of our homes come with a separate flexible room for just this reason, and we’ve noticed how popular garden rooms and studios are becoming. Also, when you’re choosing a home, make sure that all the bedrooms are a reasonable size if you can. That way, older children have their own space away from the main room, which they can retreat to when needed.

Storage in Open Plan Rooms

While we’re all more relaxed about having our kitchens on display when visitors come over, most of us don’t like having our clutter exposed. Storage is an essential part of successful open plan living, and you’ll notice how many cupboards our kitchens have. A utility room or large cupboard gives you a handy storage and laundry space, and also cuts down on the sound of the washing machine.

Experience Open Plan Living with Hopkins Homes

For many families, an open plan layout is an easy and sociable way of life. It places the kitchen at the heart of the home, which is perfect for family meals, entertaining and simply grabbing a coffee while you work at the island unit. At Hopkins Homes, we have a great variety of architectural designs and layouts, with homes to suit everyone’s way of life.