has anyone created an entrance hall in a house that opens straight into sitting room?

[hatwoman]

we're moving in a few weeks and I'm wondering about changing the lay out of the new house. at the moment the front door opens straight into the main reception room. the room is quite big - 33' by 13'10 - and the door is in the middle of the long side iyswim. I'd actually quite like to chop the room in half anyway - to create a smaller cosy sitting room and then use the other half as part of a dining kitchen. I love houses with big welcoming entrance halls - but can't bear ones that open into a dark corridor. anyone got any great ideas (and the ability to explain them without drawing them!) as to what we could do? if we built an entrance hall (not corridor) would the resulting rooms be a really weird shape?

ok I'm going to try to draw it

k |
i | bottom
t |of stairs

dr _
|
|
sitting |
room |
dr __

not bad actually. I should have been an architect.

so one possible idea is to build a wall dividing the big room into two, giving a cosy sitting room in the r-hand half of it; and knock the wall down that currently divides the kitchen and big room to make a big kitchen dining room. but how, if at all, could an entrance hall fit into this?

there's no scope for building outwards.

that so didn;t look like that a minute ago.
that just looks like a load of nonsense.
imagine if you will that the "Kit" is about half the size of the sitting room and the bottom of the stairs is to the right of the kitchen.

What type of house is it? Could you add an external porch in keeping with teh style?

we can't build on to the front - it opens straight from the road. It's an old farmhouse.

Pretty easy to construct something internal then. I agree coming in straight off the street is not as nice as a hall. I have a period house and the downstairs is mainly open plan so I had to construct a hall. I bought a reclaimed quite statement door with stained glass etc and had a carpenter build around that

but does it make the rooms a funny shape? and does it matter?

it's got a back door too - car parking space is at the back - the current owners never use the front door - we certainly wouldn;t use it ourselves

I did exactly that with my house, it had a huge dining room which the front door opened onto and the stairs were at the other end so we just put a stud wall with a doorway (at the stairs end) and had a smaller dining room (but still a fair size) and a decent size hall with living room off on one side and dining room kitchen at the other. I love it, I much prefer walking into a hallway.

The partition wall was done in a weekend - it wasn't a difficult job.