Access all areas: Your guide to open and broken-plan living

Before you demolish those downstairs walls, here are some structural ideas you can take to your architect

WATCH any TV home improvement show with a five-figure budget, and there’s one common denominator in almost every episode — the demolition of downstairs walls. The grinning, structural wipe-out is generally between the kitchen and the former dining-room or main reception room to create a kitchen/diner.

“Taking a wall down” is the energising, familiar riff — scooping the stud-work, skirting and blocks out of homes originally designed to shear off various social interactions into designated, intimate rooms.

Once the topography of domestic manners surviving from the Edwardian era went under assault, we never looked back.

Bookcases and dividers like this Baron from Knoll, €9340, Nest, and on order at Knoll suppliers.

Still, the everyday success of the open-plan home is not determined by just a sense of spatial connectedness, stunning sight-lines, socialising form the kitchen and cliff walled chic. Struggling with an echoing dance hall of yawning uninterrupted metres, has had a profound impact on my life — practically, emotionally and aesthetically. I’ve written these columns for 20 years in an un-sheltered corner of a 65-square metre room that digests all of my day-time living areas. I was single when I built circa 2000.

Row with your darlings here, and you can swish the taffeta out the door defiant, but then are forced to sulk and steam, trapped in a bedroom or left muttering in a parked car. I’ve had it, and we’re re-configuring this spring. Here’s a few painfully learned pointers to succeed with open-plan living.

NOWHERE TO RUN, BABY?

Balance open-plan day-time frolics room with at least one snug/large office/garden room or modest, determined family room with a door. Think about a full house and the need for privacy or quiet, the teenager who wants to have a friend or two over to languish horizontal, and will otherwise have to hide out in their bedroom.

Keep at least one daytime room to run away to. The exquisite balance of public and private space, especially in a busy family home, is crucial to the success of open plan. Kahrs Lodge Breeze wood flooring €36/sq m.

Sometimes I just need to do a “Dietrich” and be alone — no reason given. Real-life is not a light-drenched magazine illustration and losing the old-fashioned arteries of corridors and other circulation spaces can seriously back-fire.

A seasoned architect will bring this exquisite tension of public to private to your attention from the start, riai.ie

BROKEN PLAN

Increasingly, we see the editing of sheer open plan to what is termed a broken plan, split with low dividing walls, walk-around fire-place settings, internal glazing like bi-fold and pocket doors, super islands and kitchen peninsulas.

There’s a firmer, declaration of specific, protected, private spaces within the larger room and generally, service spaces like utility rooms and back halls are preserved.

Ask your architect to show you how it’s done and check out thousands of broken-plan solutions online at houzz.ie

LAYER WITH LIGHT

Shifting from room living to open plan, many of us feel somewhat exposed and oddly vulnerable. As well as adding comfort with furniture placement, gentle division and texture, wall colour can be used to push walls around visually. This play can be overt with really dramatic colour shifts or done with a few choices close on a colour card using a variant of white or grey — termed a tonal palette.

Open plan never looked so relaxed and curiously traditional. Emirates Hills Villa project by Nikki B Interiors based in Dubai, UAE, Brabbu

An interior designer or creatively informed paint supplier like Pat McDonell Paints have a specialist design team who can help you shuffle up the right palette in-store to start that essential on-wall testing.

VINTAGE VANTAGE POINT

Wrestling a lovely period house into a contemporary open-plan arrangement can gut its character along with the skip full of fallen masonry. If it’s a new “old” house for you — think about living in it first to see if you really want to impose a new layout on those old bones.

Would a dramatic extension be a better proposition? Vintage buildings have nebulous qualities sometimes only recognised after you’ve destroyed them — the play of light and shadow, an enclosed protected feel, the pleasing journey between rooms. There can be original features like rolling pocket doors that can solve the problem without gouging out the authentic layout. Again, take advice and a 3D virtual walkthrough.

L IS FOR LOVE

An L-shaped room allows you to walk around into another area and has a strong feeling of division while allowing for the open-plan aesthetic, access and practicality we all adore. A common application includes a run of floor-to-ceiling glazing to the longest wall uniting the spaces and providing heavenly lighting into every corner by day.

Using an extra-wide doorway (without a door) can also bring two rooms together in a parallel or L-shaped set.

Large central storage pieces can be used as a bulwark in one room to create — a kitchen, a dining room (both in the L) and a corridor to beyond finishing that square. Colour changes room to room — try subtle tonal shifts or bold colour blocking.

STRUCTURAL WALLS

There’s a misconception that all internal stud (timber) walls (lathe and plaster in old houses) are merely partitions — in a timber-framed house this is obviously not true panel to panel. Only an experienced builder or qualified engineer can establish what’s holding up the floor above, bracing other walls or even holding up the roof.

Structural supports don't disrupt this lounge. Brave Ground Colours by Dulux 2021, dulux.ie.

Upstairs, a dividing wall might be sitting on a structural “spine” wall downstairs. Steel or timber beams and/or additional posts will be necessary to support upper floors and walls before load-bearing walls are taken out, and this can impact the appearance of the ceilings and the flow, never mind blowing up the budget.

Don’t start swinging a hammer after too many Red Bulls — call in a pro. Suspended floors? Noisy. Get advice.

SKILLED SEATING

Seating that looks as good from behind as from the front has been used for decades to split space in all sorts of room planning.

L-shaped sofas and chaise sectionals are particularly adept, and in an open plan, modular pieces you can move around are a superb investment. One of the joys of fewer partitions is there’s no determined spot anything has to go — forever.

Shake things up once in a while, coming away from the walls or swinging the seating to a different spot. To pull the eye across the room, one fantastic lounge chair hovering in a deliberately generous pool of space — artful.

THOROUGHFARES

No matter how rangy the room, people have to move through those function areas — perhaps from the kitchen to the TV area or out into the garden.

Ensure there is enough space and an obvious way to cross the room. Children charge, head-down just about everywhere — narrow furniture in conduit spaces and fewer obstacles will avoid collisions. The amount of room needed to say pull out a chair is the same in an open plan diner as it is for an enfolded dining-room.

The segue from the kitchen to dining-space is easily achieved with units and storage that read as cabinet-makers' furniture. Mio bookcase from Polish maker Vox, features sliding glass and metal sections to alter its line, buru-buru.com.

Plan each function area within that glamorous third of an acre of rectified tiling with room to breathe, or you’ll end up (been there) with a curious furniture shop finish of scattered pieces without their own clear territory.

CAME FROM ABOVE

A variety of ceiling height and the inclusion of feature pendant lighting can lead the eye and again, show up those zones without strain.

Fewer walls means less room for wall displays, so bringing character into the room using ceiling tricks becomes even more important.

Your architect can explore not only split levels (be wary of changes of levels where anyone in the house has mobility issues) but dropping in and/or raising ceilings, riai.ie.

Suspension lighting can be floated into the eye-line at whatever height suits you and is fantastic for anchoring, say a large table or peninsula.