Esther McCarthy: Are Irish families really compatible with open-plan living?

Open-plan is an open SCAM

Esther McCarthy: Is it open-plan or open scam? Picture: iStock

I am standing alone in the kitchen/dining/sitting/messing room. It feels too big with just me in it. A terrible thought pops into my head: Is open-plan living one big scam?

The Cork-versus-Limerick match has lured the lads to the Treaty County; they are gone for the day, and because of an unusual blast of sun, even the cat and the dog are outside, for a bit of basking. I shut the back door, stand in the kitchen, and listen: Quiet; peace; stillness.

I close my eyes and breathe it in, along with a whiff of a discarded sports sock.

Cut to the day before. I am sitting on the sofa, trying to smash my friend in to oblivion in an online Scrabble battle. (Lame? Perhaps. But I get my kicks where I can these days). Anyway, I can’t concentrate because of all the noise. There’s a sliotar being bate just over my head at the (once-white) wall in a rhythmic thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump.

To the right of me, a homemade ramp (a metal pipe on one long bit of wood knocked together over two smaller blocks) is being used to practise grinding on a skateboard.

Tools are scattered across the floor and a discarded scooter that couldn’t be ‘dialled’.

One of the children is replaying a nonsense clip of Jesse Pinkman, from Breaking Bad, sobbing in a high-pitched voice, “He can’t keep getting away with it!”. The title of the clip is, ‘When bro swaps your inhaler for helium’. This tripe is causing laughter to the point of tears. I am baffled and distracted and miss an obvious triple-letter score with a precious Q.

The radio is on in the kitchen part of the room. The kettle is boiling, jumping around the counter because the seal is gone; and the extractor fan is on because ever-present pasta is bubbling on the hob.

The dog is attempting to throw around a manky, squishy toy, but his cone of shame keeps scraping off the furniture, and the cat is hissing at him anytime he gets too close. Curse you, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs, and Frank Lloyd Wright, while I’m at it, and all the champions of open-plan living. I’m including Dermot Bannon in this one. Curse you all to hell.

I mean, now that I really think about it, there was nothing WRONG with us all squirrelled away in different parts of the house. In the good old days, the kitchen was for cooking, and the kitchen table was for eating. The sitting room was for…well, sitting, with a special chair for the ironing pile.

The modern Irish family is not made for open-plan living

The hall was for making and taking phonecalls — the phone conveniently located so all of downstairs and most of upstairs could hear your conversations and mock you ruthlessly if it was a boy who was calling. And the front room was where you decamped when your friends came over and you wanted to swap fancy paper in peace, or, as you got older, saliva.

Grand Designs is to blame for all this, and, by extension, foreign television. When it first hit our screens on Channel 4 back in the heady days of 1999, that first episode captured a moment, a shift in mood. And because we idiots in Ireland were just coming to terms with it being OK to have notions, we were suckered right in. The programme followed the building of a timberframe kit house in East Sussex, and the end reveal saw McCloud hotstepping into a wondrous open-plan kitchen. Oh, it had it all: The space; the natural light; the flagstone floor.

And, with that, we were hooked. Out with the cobbled-on little extensions to squeeze an extra jacks into, and in with an effusive design trend that would go on to dominate our lives and homes and reshape how we lived.

But, dagnabbit, Irish familes are not MEANT to be all together all the time. It leads to sliotars being plucked from the air and flung at skateboarders.

It leads to radios being swept off countertops.

It leads to the cat being funted out to the hall, and YouTube being banned for 24 hours.

It leads to the majority of the family having to leave the actual county so someone can have some alone time.

It was great when they were younger, though, I admit it. Back then, I definitely remember myself smiling serenely, making scones while my perfect children created works of Lego art and brushed each other’s hair. There are fresh flowers in a giant vase on a sideboard in this memory of mine, and a bowl of only bright green apples on the kitchen island, because the red ones clash with my interior palette. (Shut up, anyone who was actually ever in my house back then.)

I must admit, I did relish raising our family in a communal, connected space… when they were smallies.

Now they are biggies, bring back outhouses, I say. At least then you have the time it takes to go to the toilet on your own.

But… I did miss them. Don’t tell anyone, but the big room was TOO quiet without them all and their shenanigans. Maybe we’ll hang onto the open plan for another year, anyway. But I’m hiding the sliotars.