An examination of open-plan living

Robert Frost wrote that “good fences make good neighbours”. Well, I would add to that that strong, sound-proofed walls and the occasional closed door make for content families.

Having moved from an elderly many roomed mews to a timber framed open-plan house where I can skid across my floor from the kitchen to the master bedroom, I am daily amazed at the difference uninterrupted volume can make.

However, my house has little privacy outside of the bedrooms and bathrooms. Having waxed lyrical at the sensuous rhythm of space in my house for two years I now long for some pokey, quiet daytime rooms sealed by heavy doors where I can get away from the 21st century basketball court that is my daily round.

Open-plan is “Now”, it’s sexy and it’s brilliant for parties. Knocking a dining room and living room together is logical as it combines their function, but ultimate open-plan (of the kind I currently inhabit) is a completely different lifestyle.

It is undoubtedly true that many of us are living in new houses that are patterned on interior designs a hundred or even two hundred years old.

It could be argued that many diminutive spaces in suburban period homes are now obsolete from their original 19th century intentions, and even the grandiose hall seems to have had its day where every square foot is critical.

Open-plan living rejects the house designs championed by the middle classes of the 1800s. The Victorians and Edwardians divided their miniature mansions into as many rooms as possible to encompass the different roles and activities demanded of the upwardly mobile.

Doing without a defined dining room in the early 1900s would be seen as nothing short of barbaric. Life in a two-room cottage with the family sleeping by the fire or overhead in a lofted area was in all likelihood a good deal warmer in winter than a large terraced home of multiple rooms. Relying on open fires, it was critical to be able to close off a larger home into just a few areas that could be made cosy for the family. This all but chained the woman or maid or the house to tending fires for most of the year from dawn until dusk.

With the improvement in heating systems and the paring down of our lifestyles to an intimate, casual, child friendly environment free of social conventions of the past, dividing a house into rigid task spaces from dining rooms to even “good rooms” had become questionable.

If you and your family need room to breathe, space may be too important to include “dead” transition areas and occasion rooms in a conventional “room” layout.

However, by electing to create dramatic new space by integrating corridors, staircases and rooms, you may as Terence Conran puts it “lose your bearings”. Here are just a few things to consider before you disembowel that Victorian semi-d or bravely throw 1500 of your 2000 square feet together on that architect’s plan.

A subtle balance between private (and I don’t mean bedrooms) and communal spaces is vital and most conscientious architects and house designers will politely reign in your more expansive designs.

Married kitchens and living spaces look fabulous in the well-lit shots in glossy magazines. Inhabited by waif-like designer adults dishing up diner with Prozac-induced delight. Every surface in the kitchen is gleaming, every celery stalk freshly fluffed.

In many instances the reality is a complete pain in the grill pan, scenting the whole house with yesterday’s meals and leaving the untended chaos of the kitchen right in your eye-line as you flop into an easy chair. Life is not a magazine cover.

When it comes to open plan the whole area that is funkily liberated from walls has to be kept in good order. The art of room division using floor height, materials and furniture arrangement can psychologically break up open-plan areas, but it cannot deliver the air of calm, privacy and sheer mystery that individual rooms neatly contain.

Another basic consideration is that for many of us the very presence of rooms not only allow us to vary our décor, the walls themselves help us to logically arrange and stage our furniture, anchoring it to something solid. Organising an open plan area without physical divisions can be deceptively complicated.

Open plan living can have a profound and potentially disastrous effect on interpersonal relationships. Do you really want to spend every moment of the day listening to your little darling’s squawk over the Telly Tubbies? Could you instead enjoy waving your beloved away to, say a study, where he can watch sport or colourfully question the designers of his computer software without interrupting your leisure hours?

Sleeping galleries that overlook a “great room” are nothing short of lunacy unless you are just using them for overnight guests or live completely alone.

A popular new trend in London loft design is to take the wall out from between the main bedroom and the on-suite replacing it with a simple screen for visual discretion. Hello? What about audible discretion? I’ll draw a polite veil over any further sensual imaginings on that subject, but talk about a romance killer!

An illusion of space is not real spatial freedom. Day-to-day, it can be torture.