Open for Living

Hustle and Flow
Daniel Kurth of Castle Gate Construction in Victoria recently finished a 2,200-square-foot addition/remodel in a western suburban home. The homeowners are gourmet cooks and wanted a beautiful kitchen that was also very functional.

“People often have the misperception that they have to just take down some walls to achieve an open floor plan,” he says. “But there are lots of details to pay attention to and one that often gets overlooked are the traffic patterns. How do people actually move in the house? You have to interview the family and really understand how they live.”

Kurth’s design opened up the kitchen into the two-story-high great room divided by a stunning freestanding stone fireplace. On a less dramatic but equally important note, he made the natural throughways ample and unencumbered. This makes food-laden treks to the new sunroom/dining area an easy jaunt.

And while guests enjoy the water views, the host can keep an eye on the bubbling stovetop through a bank of windows between the two rooms. “Windows can open up the feeling of a space as much as taking down a wall,” Kurth says.

Defining Space in the Open
Rick Denman of Charles Cudd Signature Homes in Minneapolis emphasizes attention to design basics is necessary to successfully pull off the open floor plan. “I think it is important that each room has its own definition, even if those rooms are open,” he says. “You don’t want to end with just a huge rectangular room with everything dumped into it.”

Smartly used details can define rooms and add necessary character where delineating walls are absent. Design elements like tray vaulted ceilings, soffits, wall textures, and transition ways, such as arches and half walls, can subtly announce the end of one space and the beginning of another. “Even changing a floor surface, transitioning it from wood to tile to carpet, can define a space,” Denman says. 

Height in floor plans with long sightlines is important because a ceiling that feels low in an expansive space can give the area an unwanted bowling alley look. “In the eighties and nineties, eight-foot ceiling height was typical,” Denman says. “That worked when you had separate formal rooms, dining space, living space, and kitchen. Now you’ll see all those spaces mingle, but with a higher ceiling and other elements like varying cabinet heights or lighting to draw the eye upward. It’s a design must.”

Furniture also works harder to delineate spaces than ever before. Now we’re seeing lots of dining rooms with only two walls, so how do you know that it’s a dining room? “Because the table is there to tell you,” Cundy says. “The furniture provides a context clue and that is all we need to define a room. It’s all in how you use it.”

This lean away from hard-defined spaces holds an additional benefit: With a more flexible definition of how each space in the home is used, homeowners can modify the rooms to fit their needs over a longer time period.

All That’s Old...
With the strong market influence of America’s Baby Boomers, one-level living—the hallmark of mid-century homes—is indeed back. Rambler owners can take their hip selves out to celebrate.

“Forty percent of the houses we built in 2005 were ramblers with open floor plans that incorporated many rooms within one large great room,” says Tom Stokes of Brenshell Homes, Inc., in St. Bonifacius. “The empty nester demographics tend to lean toward ramblers, and that whole group of individuals is coming to the forefront of the market.” These aren’t necessarily the ramblers of the seventies and eighties, Stokes explains. “With these floor plans you get big, vaulted ceilings and decorative woodwork that wasn’t around in previous eras.”

In the typical ranch plan, most of the living space, master bedroom, and laundry is all on the main level, and additional bedrooms are on the secondary level with perhaps a basement walkout. “For the empty nester market this eliminates the constant use of stairs,” Denman says, speaking to the greater accessibility needs for an aging U.S. population. “And styles are looking back to those fifties homes; they have a good floor plan and the rooms relate properly to each other. The design of a good floor plan is timeless.”