To Think That Open Plan Living Is Just a Fashion of The Moment

[Lazypeopledrivemecrazy]

Me and my DH have recently moved house, and the plan for the place we chose was to integrate the kitchen, dining room, and living room. However, now that we've settled in, and begun getting prices for the work, I'm getting a bit worried that all this open plan living, is just a bit of a fad that will go out of fashion in a few more years, and then we'll all want all the walls that we knocked down put up again. Thoughts please people.

Unless you’re planning on selling on in the next few years then who cares whether or not it’s ‘fashionable’?
Have your home how you want it to be, you are the ones who live there, sod what everyone else thinks!

Having said that I would never rush in to and large scale renovation which, in the event you didn’t like it, would be costly to revert back to how it was.
Live in the house for a while & take note of whether you find yourselves wishing the space was different before you draw up plans to change it.

We’ve got an open plan kitchen, dining, sitting area which overlooks the garden, but we do have two separate reception rooms at the front, and a boot room / utility room, so it works really well. At our old house, we had the open plan space plus a sitting room and no ancillary places, and it was a total pain in the neck…

We have the best of both worlds, open plan but double doors into the living room where the wall was, so we do have the option to open them up or close them.

I don’t like it but I’m not sure how much of a fad it is as it was popular when we bought our first property ~10 years ago. We struggled to find somewhere with a separate kitchen. I agree with others if you don’t like it you don’t have to have it even though it’s popular.

I’m in my second property now and I have a sort of best of both worlds with a dividing wall between the kitchen and living space (property is small, never went up the ladder me).

I have a separate kitchen and a living room /dining room combined. I like to shut everyone else out of the kitchen when I am cooking and also to shut the door to keep out the sound of the washing machine. We also have a small office which was a life saver during covid.

I have two Victorian houses. One has a separate front room and dining room, and one has the wall between these knocked through. I prefer the one which hasn’t been knocked through. I think if you are going to knock through to make a thru lounge, don’t make the gap so wide. That way you can at least install doors if you fancy having it closed off now and again.

We knocked all our walls down in 1985 when we moved in. Bit of a long moment.

I personally hate it but some people love it and that's their prerogative

Yes why do you want or need cooking smells throughout downstairs, or want to heat 500m2 or want your kids playing Xbox in your ear

I like to be able to shut off the living area if need be. I have typical terrace house but instead of knocking the front and back rooms double doors were put in, which I have replaced with crittal style glass doors. They are open 95% of the time, but can be closed off. It's nice to have a grown up or more formal space.

I live alone and mine is open plan but angled which helps a bit with separation

However if I could have my dream house it would be
Big open kitchen/dining area/casual seating
Separate utility
Separate living room

The washing machine annoys me most as I can't put it on when I WFH and need subtitles if I'm watching TV!

Mine is this so the sofa faces the living room window and I'm not staring at the kitchen!

we have an open plan kitchen/diner and a separate lounge. People are always suggesting to us that we should knock it4 all out to create one room. I love my kitchen/diner space and we would definitely consider an extension so that it was bigger and more user friendly, but I would never give up having at least 2 rooms downstairs for all the reasons flagged on here - you need to be able to separate to give space, privacy, peace etc.

I don't hate open plan but I do find it impractical.

If you have open plan, it's harder to comfortably heat certain areas so you end up paying more. You get cooking smells as others have said. It's more difficult for privacy and there's no quiet space to go and e.g. take a phone call in. If someone wants to watch TV and the other wants to read quietly, then one of them is going to have to go upstairs.

I do get the appeal of a big space, but I think it only works if you've got a big enough house for you to have other rooms to retreat into.

I'm probably older than you and it's got me thinking about 'fads' over the years and what my parents did.
There was a phase of everyone knocking through the front room to the back room, but with an arch, which was the thing to have back then. Sandstone fireplaces - trendy in the 80's. Knocking out original fires, and fireplaces 70's/80's. 'building over the garage' - for that spare bedroom. Looked so aesthetically ugly unless the original roof was incorporated. And a minor one - the serving hatch - basically a hole in the wall between kitchen and living room for the lady on the house to serve everyone easily!
Trends will always come and go, but IMHE,

1. mum and dad regretted knocking front and back room through as once we were teenagers, we didn't want to sit with them and there was no other room downstairs other then our kitchen. We ended up hanging out in our bedrooms!
2. cost of heating will be a massive concern for many these days and to have an open plan kitchen/living room will be very costly in this respect. I've lived like this and was always cold.
3. I have always hat pets-I much prefer a conservatory type extension on to my kitchen (or at least one garden facing wall) as it traps muddy paws etc.. before they come directly into the house. Food for thought!

Addition: I couldn't stand the constant tidying up and mess in a large communal kitchen. With separate living space you can just close the door and sit in 'tidy'!

Most people knock the dining room and kitchen together, but keep the sitting room separate.

There are a few downsides but I would never go back to me standing alone in a kitchen whilst friends and family are drinking and chatting at the other end of the house. I love it for entertaining and it's so much more convivial.

I do have another den room but v rarely use it when not working.

We have a similar layout and it works very well. I think a mixture of the two is optimal.
And If open plan becomes an issue, it really isn’t that difficult to put in walls!

Open plan is technically already out of style, but I don’t think well-done open plan is something that will ever truly go away, and there will always be those who like it (as well as those who hate it). A open concept L-shaped floor plan where the kitchen is not in view of the living area, for example, is something that I think will stay perennially popular, if not always the height of fashion. Ditto the large, fully open living/dining/kitchen spaces where there are also separate rooms (utility, spice kitchen, boot room, snug, study, etc) where dirtier/smellier elements of life are kept separate and people can escape the main room if they want.

The thing that I think will die out and stay dead is poorly-done open plan, where there are no downstairs walls or separate rooms at all and all activity happens in that one single room. People need spaces in their homes where they can escape in order to concentrate or relax, or to do things like laundry or smelly cooking without the whole room getting a whiff.

It works well for young families. I wouldn't want to have a separate kitchen in the coming years. I love to cook and listen to my DD's stories from school. But I would love to have a separate snug/sitting room where I could watch Netflix in silence at the end of the day. So kitchen+dining+small sitting area and a separate sitting room will be the ideal layout for me.

It's a way for tiny new builds to pretend there's space for living room and dining room and charge over the odds when actually it's just a living room with space to cram a table in the corner.

Not a big fan of open plan. Would only have it if there was a separate lounge too.

What’s a spice kitchen?

l saw a house on Rightmove the other day. Period 20’s/30’s. All knocked through with marble floor and grey bifold doors to the garden. Looked freezing and horrible.

Yes! You see all these truly lovely open-plan houses on the TV (Grand Designs, Your Home Made Perfect, etc.) but that's not what most of us have. We're mostly in old properties (Victorian, 1930's) whose original footprint doesn't accommodate open-plan without serious building works / extensions, or we're in these new-builds which use it to pretend the house is spacious when it's not.

I'm not a fan.

And I do wonder how much it costs to heat an open-plan house.