When will open plan go away?

[Anonymous]

We're about to combine our kitchen and dining room. It's so annoying to have two dining tables a few feet away from each other.

I'll still have a separate living room, but this will work for my family and give us more space.

My MIL has living room, kitchen, and dining in one space, the only space on the first floor besides a bathroom and mudroom. It's noisy when people are there, but she loves it.

[Anonymous]

I love the separate spaces we have in our city apartment, but we went with open plan for our vacation home. It works well in that setting, where we often have houseguests and are entertaining in an informal way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DP here. We are Indian-Americans and love our delicious spice and herbs infused foods. No, not just curry, but we use herbs, spices, condiments, garlic, fennel, onions, leeks, ginger, galangal etc for all the cuisines that we make - Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern etc.

We do the following to get rid of smells and smoke -
1) We have a hood over the cooking range that vents outside the house. We wash the filters pretty regularly
2) We also open the kitchen window and use two powerful vornado fans to vent outside. The hood also vents on the same side of the house, so we make sure that we are not pulling that back in the house. On the opposite side of the house, we open the windows to create some cross ventilation.
3) we close all doors on all levels to prevent the smell from travelling.
4) We shut down the HVAC to prevent the smell from circulating when we are cooking.
5) We makes sure that our jackets etc are stowed in the coat closet and the door is closed to prevent the smell permeating into clothes and outerwear.
6) We have a UV light in our HVAC and heavy duty filters and it basically removes all smells.

We cook a lot and every day and there is no smell of curry or anything else in our home. Having a seperate closed off kitchen will not change anything if you have the same HVAC system circulating air in the whole house.

This post sounds so yummy, except for fennel

Kill the fennel

[Anonymous]

I hate the open floor plan it's so noisy and it looks so cheap.

They will stop building that way when people stop buying them. The builders save so much money not using walls.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hate the open floor plan it's so noisy and it looks so cheap.

They will stop building that way when people stop buying them. The builders save so much money not using walls.

Open floor plans aren't necessarily cheaper

[Anonymous]

I'm so glad we pushed back on the architects suggestions to turn our separated rings into an open floor plan.

I think it's certainly behind less popular post pandemic and with more wfh.

[Anonymous]

We built our house and chose not to have an open floor plan and absolutely love it.
We have never regretted our choice.
If you like traditional floor plans, go for it! You will have buyers

[Anonymous]

I don't think it's a new-fangled open floor plan thing... Growing up as a kid in the 80s and 90s, I can't think of even one of my friends' houses that had a kitchen that could be closed up with doors on all sides. Sure, some had more walls than others, but it wasn't like you could shut smells behind kitchen doors then either...

[Anonymous]

Four-plus years since this thread was started it doesn't seem that open plan is going anywhere.

[Anonymous]

I just don’t see it going back to fully closed off kitchens in 4 K houses and smaller. Open concept increases the flow and usable square footage. As people now want home offices, large master baths, etc etc the square footage has to come from somewhere. Closing off a kitchen but still making that space large enough for another seating area uses up space. You also lose flexibility on where you place it to make sure you have good window access.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Four-plus years since this thread was started it doesn't seem that open plan is going anywhere.

Disagree. It starts with the wealthy and takes years to trickle down to the masses.

The grey trend started maybe a decade before your average American was painting their walls grey. Then it went out of style for the wealthy a good 5 years before it fell out of favor with the average person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Four-plus years since this thread was started it doesn't seem that open plan is going anywhere.

Disagree. It starts with the wealthy and takes years to trickle down to the masses.

The grey trend started maybe a decade before your average American was painting their walls grey. Then it went out of style for the wealthy a good 5 years before it fell out of favor with the average person.

Has the grey trend fallen out of favor with the average person? I still see a lot of it. I thought it was a fleeting trend years ago but it seems to still be going strong.