Will open-plan fall out of fashion?

[dollyolly]

Just moved into a 1930s 3-bed (ok, 2.5 bed) – it's one of very few in the area that hasn't been structurally changed in any way. No extensions, no walls knocked through. Small-ish kitchen with two downstairs reception rooms.

Everyone assumes we'll knock walls through to create an open-plan space, but it suits my husband and I as it is, as it's just us here.

I know open-plan has pros – for example, I guess it's very useful to be able to keep small kids in view, and a lot of people hate small kitchens. Plus, spaces can be more multi-functional.

But I wonder if there'll be a move back to privacy, separateness, each room having a very defined purpose. Open-plan is relatively recent, and there were good reasons for designing these homes as they originally were.

Interested to hear thoughts on this. Why do you love open-plan (or not)? Has anyone regretted knocking walls through? Do you agree it could fall out of fashion and folks will start putting walls back in?

That's why stunning apartments flats are open plan. Greedy developers.

Agree with this, except that I'd say the tide has already turned against huge, open plan spaces. They only really work if (a) no one is WFH

If you have room for HUGE open plan, you would have room for separate office.

I’m not sure when it stopped, but used to be planning law that houses had to have minimum sizes for rooms, council houses especially those usually built in the fifties were really quite generous & had large gardens.

I really dislike open plan. I live in a 1930's estate and everyone has done the knock through thing with the huge bi fold doors opening out into the garden.

I like the way it looks but feel uncomfortable being in a living room that is part of the kitchen. I'm sure if we had bought a typical 3 bed semi we'd have done the same.

Our house is unusual for the estate as it's one of a pair of semis built over three plots of land so we have a four bed on a wider footprint which gave us a good sized kitchen rather than the traditional 1930's galley.

I sometimes worry that when we try to sell we'll regret not doing the fashionable knock through but I really love having the separate rooms. Also I'm a messy cook!

We had a lounge through archway dining room and separate dining kitchen but the dining part was pretty small. The dining room was really only used a thoroughfare from the living room to the kitchen and vice versa.
We knocked down the wall between the kitchen and dining room and installed sliding opaque glass doors between the living room and dining room.
I love the open plan feel but can close the doors to have a cosy living room as required. We also moved the under stairs door in the living room to the kitchen and created a pantry and used the back 3rd of the garage to make a utility/downstairs loo/side entrance.
It's changed the way we live for the better. We do have a busy household though with lots of coming and going.

I don't care whether it's fashionable or on trend or not. I have always preferred separate rooms and always will.

I'm another who has never liked open plan, although I do like a kitchen with enough room for a table or some sort of seating. When we were househunting 10 years ago, the estate agents mostly acted as if I was mad when I said I did not want open plan. But with 3 kids, we did not want DC1 to be doing trombone practice in the same room where DC2 was trying to do homework on the family computer and where DC3 had invited a friend back to watch TV. Separate rooms and the ability to shut the door on noise and distraction are important.

Surprised noone has mentioned the term 'broken plan' yet (but some clearly have this). Seems to be the way things are going. We're doing a renovation where we're making a big kitchen diner that has a wide (1.6m) opening to the living room with sliding doors so they can be open or closed as desired.
We're lucky that we also have another reception room that is entirely separate.

When my DC were small I had a very large kitchen with a large table in. A dining room we used as a living room with lots of the kids toys in. We also had a sitting room that DH and I used after kids were in bed. I loved being able to shut the door on the toys, especially DS's Brio train track. It meant it didn't have to be broken up and put away in the evening and made again the following day.

Prefer a separate front room

Have open plan kitchen but with visitors I'd rather shut the door

We have (had) a house exactly like that OP. We’re just coming to the end of an extension. Kitchen now is dining area, then where garage was is kitchen and utility. Reception 1 is living room as it was before, reception 2/dining is now playroom. Doors and walls on both thank god. So I’d say that’s not open plan personally. My friend is always saying ‘why aren’t you opening all this up?’…. But at her house I literally can’t stand how we’ll be talking, she’ll have music on, her kids have the TV on all in the same room 🫨🫨 can’t cope!
Walls and doors are underrated!

(Also above new kitchen are 2 single beds, omg the difference already….. such a more serene house what with having more space!!)

I like a separate kitchen. I love a proper dining room with no distractions. No washing machine, no dishes, no mess, no tv. Just focus on eating/sitting/doing homework/craft/playing games.
I don't like eating in the kitchen.
I definitely prefer separate rooms.

If you look at this graph, you can see that there was a growth in the birth rate after the war (the baby boomers), a corresponding boom a generation later (late 80s / early 90s) and yet another boom (approx 2010) when the DGC appeared. The fad for open plan seems to have coincided with these DGC being toddlers. Now they are growing into teenagers, open plan doesn't work so well and it is going out of fashion.

I've never been a fan of open plan. It's too big a space to heat. It's too noisy. I don't want my kitchen chaos on display (I find it amusing that people have re-invented the concept of a domestic room and now call it a utility). But I also don't like the idea of a modern kitchen looking like a sterile showroom with nothing on the worksurfaces, as if nobody ever actually cooks there. I don't like the lack of walls to act as a backdrop for furniture or a place on which to hang art. Open plan rooms, especially those with huge windows, seem to have so much empty, wasted space.

I think it's about what suits you as your family grows. What suits small DC may not work for teens or be ideal if one of you needs to work from home.

When DH and I bought our house, a separate dining room was a red line for me and I loved it. Two children later and it was never used as we ate all meals in the kitchen. By the time we had DC 3 we had knocked the wall down to make a kitchen diner.

I also couldn't fathom when our DC were small why an older relative had a separate lounge for her teens. By the time mine we're obsessed with Nintendos I would have sold a kidney for a teen den so that I could watch TV in peace.

TL:DR enjoy it, but be open to change.

We have a 1930s house with a separate kitchen, I prefer the kitchen out of the way and we didn't live here when DS was young.

The Haynes 1930s House manual is a good book but quite hard to get hold of at a reasonable price secondhand, I don't think you can buy it new, I bought mine from World of books through Amazon for about £18 which was a lot cheaper than most.

Update, I see there is a paperback book just been released of the Haynes 1930s house manual for £23, some of the secondhand hardbacks were silly money.

Broken plan is more sensible.

Yes!
Nice to look at.
But if someone is in our kitchen I neither want to smell it or hear it.
I may as well be out there myself. No thanks.

Every time my teens have a gaggle of friends over, I am SO grateful for our separate rooms. We have a small kitchen-diner, and and two small receptions, so not a palace by any means, but different spaces for the family members to have some privacy make it feel bigger than it would otherwise be.

Where would I go otherwise? Upstairs to sit on my bed?

I think things like listening to the dishwasher gurgling while you’re watching a film is very annoying so I’d always want s nest type space to watch TV

I've bought a house with an open kitchen/dining/living area and have just put in a new wall between the living and the dining area and 3 new doors to close the areas off.

Infinitely better that way. You can heat up the areas you want when you want to, without boiling whoever is cooking, close the door so kitchen smells don't travel up, and have a conversation on the phone in the living areas while someone has the extractor on in the kitchen.

I live in a house that’s semi open plan. Separate kitchen and lounge diner open plan. The space is huge as one previous owner extended then another added a conservatory. All in all it’s 40 feet long into the conservatory, and it takes a fair bit of heating. Lovely in the summer, but perishing in the winter. Before the utilities virtually doubled overnight it was ok, but it’s now a different story.

I’ve previously had a kitchen diner and prefer a separate kitchen. That way when you’re dining you don’t have the dirty pots on display. Used to have a separate lounge, which I miss, it was sanctuary in the evening. We’re never satisfied are we 🤷‍♀️😝

I like having a separate dining room and kitchen - I don't want to be surrounded by pots and pans when I'm eating Christmas dinner, for example.

But I also don't understand dink grooms which are down the hall from the kitchen. I can't be running up and down the house with dishes.

@LynetteScavo hostess trolley, that's what you need!

I think in the 1930s, while cooking had got cleaner and safer, kitchens were still very functional and at least to my modern eye, quite ugly. The kitchen was still something to shut behind a door.

Having 'fashions' in housing design is a very modern idea. It's only now that more people own their own homes that they can even think about having a layout which suits them.

My parents were of the generation who bought a house and just lived with it, inconveniences and all. The family home was a 1920s semi detached. In the 30 years they lived there all they did was rewire right at the start. No structural changes, no fitted kitchen.

Mind, my 60 year old DB is the same. After the family home was sold, he saw what the new owners had done to the house and described it as a desecration. They had knocked through the kitchen into the dining room and added an ensuite to the main bedroom.

Hardly painting pentagrams and setting up the place for devil worship.

People are weird and DB is definitely one of them!

@dollyolly

The 1930s Home (Shire Albums) (Shire Library) https://amzn.eu/d/hYJYfDV

I have my copy already! And have ordered a copy of the Hayes manual another poster mentioned. Thanks again for the suggestion :) Looking forward to reading both.