Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We built a tri level home with living ground floor, family room down from that, dining room and kitchen was up from the ground floor living room. All open with railings to each floor. Didn’t like that at all so walled off the family room from the ground floor living room and put in a door at the stairs. SO much nicer. Could be in the lower level family room for movies and not have to hear the dishwasher. The teens could be down while the adults were up. SO much better than all 3 levels being open.
I did a thread on this years ago and now the chickens are coming home to roast. I've always HATED open concept homes!
lol, this isn't "chickens coming home to roast" at all. It is simply a change in taste.
I personally love an open floor plan. I hate small tiny closed off rooms. I especially hate floorplans that have a closed off living room and dining room then kitchen. why the heck would I ever want to isolate myself just because I'm cooking.
Feels like a punishment, lol "yea must be banished to the kitchen".
I don't know why it is so freaking hard for you people to understand what a few of us are telling you.
You say "quit being so upset, just buy a house that isn't open plan."
Great!!!! Just freaking find one, unless you have the money to build from scratch. In the areas where I've been looking for a slightly larger house for some years now, something like 95% of houses offered for sale have been "remodeled" by removing walls. It is becoming practically impossible in some areas of the country to find a non-open-plan house for sale. Even "putting walls back" is usually not an option because rooms (typically kitchens) have been expanded past the original location of the now vanished walls, so you would have to gut that area of the house and totally rebuild.
When you take a house that was originally designed with traditional room divisions and knock out walls and change the shapes of rooms, etc., it usually ends up looking weird, too. Very few of these remodelings are done well, either in the way they're designed or in the quality of construction.
I will say it again for those who seem to have difficulty understanding:
The reason those of us who don't like the open plan house are getting acerbic, is because there are fewer of them every year and there seems to be no reversal of the trend.
Got it, yet?
And what YOU DON'T understand is that if 95% of the houses are open floor plan that means the majority of folks LIKE them.
This is how a very basic explanation of how business works, if you wish to make money you give the consumer what they want.
Now unfortunately YOU are in the minority, if I am a home builder I am not building a house for the minority. period.
Get acerbic all you want, which pretty much is useless. you have limited choices.
suck it up and build from scratch to get what you want, hold off until one of the 5% traditional builds open up or buy open floor plan.
No chickens are coming home to roost. People who don't like open floor plans are bizarrely invested in trying to convince the people who do like open floor plans that they are wrong.
lol, personally I call it jealousy but what do I know, I love open floor plans.
My favorite network is HGTV so I've seen the open-concept as the go-to trend for years now. I've never liked the open-concept floor plans personally. The main reason is because my beliefs are that one's kitchen should never be on display publicly to those entering the home. The kitchen not only has dirty dishes and pots but scents/aroma/smells which linger from earlier cooking and meals. That's not something that I'd necessarily want to greet people as they enter my home (although I'm currently in an apartment, I hope to be in a house within the next year). Glad to hear the trend is changing. Now I won't feel so alien from everyone else who seemed to love the open-concept.
At the end of the day it's all personal preference. We don't have dirty dishes in the sink and have a great ventilation system so your issues are not my issues, and I don't have a those problems you describe. You did mention that you live in an apartment so maybe size is driving your issue as well. Or maybe you just don't like it, that's fine too!
Growing up in New England, it's not uncommon to live in a house that was built 100-150 years ago when it wasn't uncommon to have housekeepers and cooks for entertaining. The separate kitchen with an entryway to the formal dining room was the norm. Now that we do it ourselves, its fun to have people mingling when you're cooking the family meal. We have a nice island with bar stools and we can all chat while Sunday dinner is doing its thing.
I am not a fan of open concept. If I am watching TV I don't want to hear everything going on in the kitchen (cupboards being slammed, food cooking, dishwasher on..). I do like an open concept kitchen & dining room though! At my current home we have a galley style kitchen open to the dining room, but the living room is literally behind the kitchen wall so it pretty much feels open concept because you can still hear everything. My kids turn the TV up way too loud because they can't hear it when someone is in the kitchen cooking. Just not a fan!
At our rental property we own (built in the 1920s), all the rooms are separated! We plan to open the wall so the kitchen & dining flow together because it's currently separated by a door so it feels very closed off from one another. The living room is way off on the other side of the home and I really like that!
I designed a passive solar house with an open-concept LR/Kitchen. The island helped define the space. On the second floor I incorporated a great room to bring the light to the doorways of the kids' bedrooms so when the door was open the light could filter in. We also had a family room which was easily accessible from the kitchen yet could be closed off to quietly read or watch television without disturbing the rest of the family.
Open concepts are essential to maximize the benefits of passive solar. However, elements for privacy can be built in. When it comes to a smaller home, an open concept can make the home feel like a large studio apartment. This can be challenging for families being able to find their own space. In that case a more traditionally segmented home may be much more livable.
Well, when I have been in or lived in houses where the kitchen was separated from the rest of the house with a door (usually a cased opening or swinging door) oddly enough no one has ever had the least difficulty finding the kitchen or hanging out in it.
I remember many incidents like this:
After the big dinner, Uncle Jimmie and Uncle Gene go into the living room to nap on the couches, then we close the swinging door between kitchen and living room; the uncles enjoy their nap while the aunts clean up the dishes, then the aunts go into the bedrooms to lie down while my grandmother, mother, myself, and my stepfather play cards or dominoes till the uncles wake up, without disturbing them. When the uncles get up, they come in the kitchen and kibitz on the domino game, or pull a chair in from the dining room and sit and have a post-dinner snack. Why do all the walls have to be removed for this to occur?
What people forget is that when you have a small house and a lot of people, separate rooms allow activities to happen in one part of the house without disturbing everyone in the house. One of these days the nearly endless supply of cheap money is going to dry up and those houses with the huge warehouse-like main area, that have to be enormous just to provide private spaces enough for a family of four, are going to seem like white elephants.
Open Concept homes will be kicked to the curb in the not too distant future.
lol and we were supposed to have driverless cars and electric cars also by now.
people have been predicting the demise of open concept since the first came on the scene. when it first gain popularity back in the 1990's folks where saying "its a fad" . 30 years is a long time for a fad.
What I think we will see is a more Hybrid type of thing where the kitchen/family area is open and then you may have a more closed off living room space.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
