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Can an open floor plan be too open?

36 min readThe open plan is a hallmark of modern living. Flow between spaces is a cornerstone of mid-century design. But do open plans always work in mid-century homes?

Right here at the top, I’m writing you a permission slip: If you like an open plan space, you can have it. Let’s open up your layout!! We’ll figure out structure and flow and make it happen.

And if you DO NOT LIKE open plan areas … you are not required to have any big open floor plan areas in your home. We can find pockets of rest, create visual and sound separation between spaces, and introduce elements to separate a too-open layout.

The right answer for you is the right answer for you!

Is an open plan good?

There’s been a lot of debate over the “right” or “wrong” nature of an open floor plan over the last couple of years. The pandemic years, in particular, created a big push back against a long standing real estate trend for big flowing spaces.

Just as builders tend to always believe that bigger is better, most new homes have been following the theory that more open plan is better for … decades really.

Sure, open plan layouts are great

And it certainly has it’s points. It can help to make a relatively small area feel larger when you can see the extents of it. Its great for throwing a big party. And for some households it help to let everyone feel connected to each other by sharing a kitchen that flows into a den on one side and a living room on the other.

Also open plan can cause problems

On the other hand as the #stayhome moment showed us … it’s hard to get a place to think your own thoughts or have your own zoom meeting in a completely open plan layout!

Long before zoom was invented, Sarah Susanka was pushing back on the trend of completly open plan social spaces with her idea of an “away room.”

An Away Room is at least one public space (not a bedroom) on the main floor of the house where someone can go away and close a door but still feel close to the family. It might be a place to go play a loud movie or video game when the house is quiet. Or it might be a place to read a book while the main house plays dance music.

One way or another, some separation of spaces is usually good!

WHY are open plans?

Well, generally when the building industry can … it will!

Pre-manufactured, engineered trusses invented in the 1950’s, can support longer spans, essentially from exterior wall to exterior wall. This means that rather than dividing the house into rooms with walls supporting the roof, you could have a fully flat, open ceiling between your kitchen, your living room, your dining room and so on. 

Having the ability to open up those spaces naturally led designers to think, well, good, let’s just open up more spaces. And suddenly, as the engineered truss technology comes into common use by the 1960s, we start to see a lot more open plan now.

We get a lot of open plan layouts that just exist because they can and not necessarily because they should.

Good ideas in design go together

Every individual design trick, style, move, structural technique, is a concept that is interlinked with other design concepts.

A post and beam house structure lends itself to big square footage of glass at the exterior walls. They also lend themselves to a more open floor plan.

When you look at the earliest mid-century post and beam houses, you’ll see that they still are divided up into rooms, even though they don’t need to be, just because of cultural convention.

Is is a plan opening remodel a good idea for you?

Deleting walls is so easy (in a floor plan drawing), but in the three dimensional spaces of a mid-century home, simply removing things isn’t always the best idea. 

More open isn’t always better. Even discounting structure, when you have the ability to pop open more spaces, to connect, more spaces within your house, you want to think about what you are trying to achieve.

Questions to ask as you plan an open plan

Do you want to have additional open sight lines? Do you want to be able to see from where you sit on the sofa and watch television all the way to the kitchen sink (to the dishes that are piled up and need to be done before bedtime)?

Or do you want more privacy? Do you want someone coming to your front door to be able to see the kitchen sink?

What do you want the connections between spaces to be? When do you want them to be all one area? Maybe when you’re throwing a big party and everyone can be part of the same conversation. Even if you were throwing a big party, do you want there to be smaller, micro conversations going on? And certainly, when you’re not throwing a big party, how do you want your spaces to feel?

A little change goes a long way

You might be able to make a huge win by opening up a wall a little bit rather than taking it down completely. Perhaps pocketing a beam, perhaps disguising the columns that support a beam over a wider opening. Think about giving yourself a division made of open spacing; a slat wall, a library wall, a planter wall. You might have the opportunity to share light, to share views, to share the ability to have a conversation across the house when needed, and all of those things can be wonderful, but it doesn’t necessarily lead you to a full open plan move. Which is always going to be a big construction project, even in a mid-century house.

Ultimately only you know if a fully open plan is right for you.

The possibilities are so many, but thinking about what kind of openness you’re looking for, considering sound connection, light connection, view connection, walkthrough connection, and then going from there is going to help you move past a binary question of open plan versus not and into the possibilities for openness where it will work best for your house and the life you want to live in it. 

Quick tip for…mid-century history books

I’ve spent the last seven plus years, maybe eight, obsessed with the history and the development and the theory and the technology and the design and the style of mid-century housing, residential architecture in the United States.

An upcoming trip to London inspired me to delve into homes of same period across the pond and I found two great reads!

There’s always more reading to do!!

If you want a jumping off point to get super excited about MCM history, theory, design details or something else … I’ve got a great place for you to get started! Grab my Must Have Mid-Century Resources List right here!

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

Laundry Drop

These built-in chutes are most often found in homes with basements and are a charming way to send laundry from the main floor directly to the laundry area. While not every Mid-Century home has one, the laundry drop is a delightful reminder of the era’s focus on practicality and efficiency.

More handy Resources

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

What do you think about open plan layouts, open floor plans? Do they connote bright, airy and ready for a party, or do they feel kind of big, blank and echoey? Does opening up rooms really make a small mid-century house feel bigger? Is more open space ever a bad idea?

I’m gonna get right to the bottom line of this episode and tell you here at the top that the right answer for you is the right answer for you, and if you need a permission slip to make your house more open or less, here it is. With that out of the way, let’s spend the rest of today’s episode talking about the whys and wherefores of open versus closed floor plans and how to adjust the layout you’ve got into something closer or exactly the right level of openness for your family.

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mount remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2102.

Before we get into open floor plans, a couple of orders of business, all tied up into one, which is that I’m going to be out of office next week on a quick jaunt to merry old England, London and the South Coast. I am traveling with my sister to see a play, to visit some places we’ve loved reading about, and generally, just to have a little getaway. And I’m bringing this up to the podcast for two reasons.

Well, two reasons, yes. The first is, you can absolutely still get in touch with mid mod Midwest while I’m away, because, in case you weren’t aware, this organization is bigger than just the voice you hear on the podcast and see on our Instagram account, mid mod Midwest is a small team, and we will be available for you if you want to get started on your mid-century master planning or schedule an appointment or ask a question, the office will be personed whether I am here or not.

So I should say, a couple of weeks ago, it mentioned that we had a rare opportunity a hole in our schedule to jump in and get a really fast tracked Master Plan processed. That is not an offer I can make anymore, because we’ve actually got projects stacking up again, particularly for me to face on my return or to get to get into. I’m very much looking forward to a couple of these.

But we still have a very organized, regularized Master Plan process. And now is still now is always the right time to get started on your plans. So if you have changes to your mid-century home in mind, if this episode sparks you to think about maybe considering your options in a master plan process, then I encourage you to reach out next week or anytime and fill in the apply to work with us form someone will answer your email and let you know what the next steps are, and send you a scheduler so that you can get onto a zoom call with me.

Although that won’t happen next week, it will happen when I return. Meanwhile, you can follow along with my journey. I will be going joyfully myself and dragging my sister along to several mid-century sites of interest, and, you know, just keeping an eye out for it everywhere I go.

This segues me nicely into my second point, which is that I’ve spent the last seven plus years, maybe eight, obsessed with the history and the development and the theory and the technology and the design and the style of mid-century housing, residential architecture in the United States, and this is pretty applicable in the Midwest, is my area of most attention, but across the US building construction techniques and strategies, the social pressures, The goals, the marketing were similar enough to create, yes, microclimates of design, but fairly standard concepts of what was a mid-century residence.

And the same is true if you get up into Canada, again with some specificity. Also, likewise, if you go to Australia or New Zealand, and I’ve had several ready to remodel students from those countries get really useful advice for their houses, applying the theories, the practices of a mid-century master plan to their homes pretty seamlessly. But architecture is not created in a vacuum. The post war culture, climate economy here in the US created our mid-century housing boom and the post war culture, climate and economy was very different in England.

So obviously to me, anyway, this creates a very different architecture of everything, but particularly of residential design. So I have been fascinated to immerse myself a little bit in the history and the technology and the designers of mid-century residential architecture in England. I turned to the internet for this first but I also came across and purchased for myself two fabulous books mid-century Britain architecture, 1938 to 1963 by Elaine Harwood and by the same author, brutalist Britain buildings of the 1960s and 70s in.

And she’s done an amazing job. These are gorgeous books. When you if you google them, you’ll immediately see why I had to purchase one. It’s got a yellow cover in my color. I just It called to me through the internet. But they’re really, really well written history, highlighting specific buildings, the architects and people who caused them to be designed, and talking about the back story, the inception point, the jumping off point.

We share a lot of the same early modernist history. In the 1920s there was a huge change in thought in mostly in Germany, across Europe, modern architects coming together, designers coming together, to declare a new kind of design, a new theory of how people should be at the center and technology should be at the center of the way buildings were created. This was practiced at the Bauhaus school in Germany before World War Two, and sort of moved around through art meetings and conferences and people’s individual relationships. World War Two was a huge shake up for that, obviously, Germany was not a good place to be a creative or an artist or questioning anything during that time.

And the scattering of a diaspora of modernist thinkers and designers into England, into the US, across various points, into Canada, Central and South America, out throughout Europe, around the world, and it’s really fascinating to me how each of those people who kind I mean, of course, they were all individuals with their own thoughts and preferences as well, but they took their relatively rigorously similar philosophy of international modernism and put it into the local environments, economies and social lives of the places where they landed so in England, what that meant they have less space.

They had a lot less resources right at the end of the war, and they had the same housing shortage that we were experiencing. If you take a couple of decades off for a recession and a war to not build any new houses for nearly a generation, you’re going to end up with a housing shortage. Ask, Hey, I’m a millennial. Ask me how I know.

But what they faced their housing shortage post war, with a lot of multi-unit housing, tower blocks, even. And so, rather than creating a new theory of fast construction of single family homes, they did a lot of public housing, and a lot of that was duplexes or small development units, or tall public housing projects, or they would call them housing estates.

So Say what you will about these, and they’ve been spurned and reviled um. Architects still love them for their reasons, for our reasons, but I’m going to be seeking out a couple of those things. I always find it to be fascinating when I’m going to travel, I want to learn about the art and the culture and the history of the people that I’m going to visit the place of to see how all of those things have affected the built environment.

And some of it will come from observation. Some of it will just be wandering around and checking out how shopping centers and transit areas and houses and churches and schools are constructed what they’re made of what their structure looks like. It is, but some of it has to come from pre study or post study, and so I love the act of digging in on the history of a place and learning a new theory and back story.

I haven’t yet added these two books to my mid-century ranch resource list, but I will. And if you sign up for that free checklist right now, it will point you towards all of my favorite books, web resources, magazines, material suppliers, movies and fiction, cinema and more. And whenever I update it, I send a list to everyone who’s ever downloaded it, letting them know that there is a new and longer list.

So you can also just go Google for mid-century Britain, by Elaine Harwood. In this vein, though, I also want to transition into the topic of today’s episode by pointing you towards one of the earliest books that I started to familiarize myself with the backstory of American mid-century architecture.

By the way, if you also love boning up on the history of a place when you travel there, or if you’ve got any insight into mid-century Britain that you want to share with me, please shoot an email or more immediately, because I’ll be out of my inbox next week, send me an Instagram DM to say hello and tell me what you know or what you wish you knew. But back to my earlier days, I picked up ranches, row houses and railroad flats Christine Hunter’s wonderful book on American homes and how they shape our landscapes and neighborhoods back in graduate school.

So gosh, coming on, 20 years ago, and it has been a favorite go to reference of mine ever since then, she connects the dots on how everything from social employment transitions, from people having labor shortage, which caused a lot of young women being willing to work inside a home as kind of a mother’s helper assist. And turning into Nope, there were jobs in factories, and that was a lot better and safer and more reliable than working inside someone’s home.

So suddenly, homes needed to change how hands on they needed to be. Needed to change things like that, things like city planning sicknesses, the flu pandemic of 1918 the city beautiful movement of 1910 zoning law, electrical wiring, technology, how all of these things come together to create what we now think of as the standard normal American Housing, and how predictable the default features of a normal American house really are the basic housing unit that you can take out of an apartment into a mid-century ranch house, into a row house, the pieces of kitchen, living, dining room, bedrooms, bathrooms, what we consider as default are so consistent.

So she does an incredible job with diagrams, with maps, with floor plans and sketches and with very, very readable text of just kind of walking you through how the built environment of this country was originally created, why we all live the way that we live today? So I’m just basically pointing you back to the resources list. This is one of the books listed in there in terms of history and backstory, but this, for me, really was my jumping off point.

When I read this, I started to wonder about the why of the buildings around me, not just what they looked like and who had designed them, but what social pressures and legal stratification that doesn’t even exist anymore had created them the way that they are. And I think once you start asking questions this way, you never look back. So if you want to start getting yourself some interesting new questions to continuously answer through your next little phase of life. Absolutely. Go check out my must have mid-century ranch resources checklist.

I’m realizing, actually right now that it is due for an update. But like I said, when I update it, I’ll let everybody who’s ever checked it out know, so go ahead and grab it right now. Get started. There’s more than 100 items on this checklist, so it will take you a while to get through them all. And you can do that by running over to midmod-midwest.com/resources or find it at the show notes page, which is, as always, midmod-midwest.com/ 2102.

So as I was just mentioning, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been coming back around to the idea that every individual design trick, style, move, structural technique, is a concept that really should be interlinked with other design concepts. These things tend to go hand in hand, or lead logically, one to another, falling like dominoes, for example, the idea of a post and beam house structure lends itself so well to big square footage of glass at the exterior walls, they also lend themselves to a more open floor plan, although when you look at the earliest mid-century post and beam houses, you’ll see that they often are divided up into rooms, even though they don’t need to be, just because of cultural convention.

Conversely, the early mid-century, homes built in the late 1940s and early 1950s were by and large, simple stick frame structures built out of two by fours that lent themselves to be divided up into small individual rooms because the joist that supported the floor and the ceiling rafters that goes right across the ceiling level were usually half the width of the house. Does that make sense?

So if you were to take one of those individual joists or rafters out, stand it up on end, its length measurement would be half the narrow width of the whole house, plus about a foot, because they were meant to overlap at the central spine. This was largely just for ease of transport, even back in the mid-century era. Well, I was going to say wood didn’t grow on trees. It did that wood is what grows on trees, but or grows in trees. But that very reason, because wood grows on trees, there are limits to the available lengths that you can cut that are consistent in diameter the whole or width the whole way along.

But I think that these lengths, the shorter joist lengths that you find in a mid-century house, they don’t span from one side of the house entirely to the other, were probably more about getting into regularized construction standards, just like the four by eight sheets of drywall, eight foot ceilings, a consistent length of studs in the walls that were about shipping ease and transporting materials across the country efficiently at speed, so that we could solve that housing crisis 75 years ago with a whole lot of new single family home construction.

And there I go, getting sidetracked by history again. Does it matter? Well, yes and no. The why of it is maybe only interest to a history nerd, but it certainly has created an effect, because the floor joist of a standard mid-century Ranch, if it’s built over a basement or a crawl space, not over a slab, is often divided in the middle. That means the basement or the crawl space of most mid-century homes has a sort of a long dividing central line.

And once you’ve gone ahead and put a support line under there, probably a steel beam running down the middle, carrying that load into columns, or maybe a triple or quadruple set of two by two by eights, two by 10s. In my house, it’s a quadruple set of two by eights. Gotta love that old growth lumber man. Can that carry a load? It made sense, then for other components of the building to run along that same spine.

So for the mechanical systems, you’ll often find that on one side or the other of that beam that’s supporting the brick and the floor joists, there is also a duct run for your HVAC system, HVAC being your heating, ventilating and air conditioning system so that structure and that mechanical system that leads itself to a basement that is divided in half the long way you can create a den space that runs along the entire length of your basement, although I never recommend that anyone does, because it tends to feel like a tube with a less than eight foot ceiling, relatively narrow wall spacing.

The longer a room is, the shorter and narrow it can feel. You can also create a den that crosses that middle spine, but it’s going to have a drop in the ceiling of the middle that will naturally break up the flow. This can still work well if you do other things again, let the dominoes fall. Let this one design concept, this structural need, lead you to the way that you arrange the space.

So you could have a series of soffits that wrap around one space and create, say, a big open den on the bigger half next to a pool table room, or a big TV room next to a little reading room, or a kid project play area next to a smaller exercise equipment area. The structure should lead our design thinking. It’s the first place to begin when you start to logically break up a space.

And the same is true upstairs in a similar agent style of house, a stick frame build at the same time also is going to have the rafters or the ceiling joists that are right above the drywall level in the ceiling, broken in the middle and resting on a central spine, and that spine is often hidden in a central line of walls. It doesn’t have to be perfectly centered. It might be more to one side or another.

That same division is happening in the main floor plan. So if you want to open up your house across from the front to the back, that’s assuming a Midwestern layout where the long direction of the house faces the street, if you are, for example, in Seattle, where I just was, and your house, your ranch, is oriented with its Gable facing the street, because you’re in a long urban lot, and that’s how a ranch can fit into that plot.

Follow this along and know I mean side to side anyway, if your kitchen is at the back of the house and your dining area as at the front your dining area. I note because it’s a mid-century house, it’s never really had a dining room in an early, mid-century modest ranch. What you actually want to take over is that dining room space, because you don’t dine so you could use more space in your kitchen.

You’re getting to span across, opening up between the front and the back of the house. You’re going to open up underneath that break in the rafter structure, which will now require engineering. The simplest way to do it is to leave a header in place and support those rafters. You can certainly do this, although there are several clever ways to make it look better.

The most intense thing you can do is to pocket a beam, which means you tear out the whole ceiling. You support all the rafters on both sides temporarily. Then you nip them all off shorter so they can terminate into a beam that’s on the same level with them, rather than sitting crossways on top of one. And then you support that beam and the hidden structure in walls on both sides of the opening.

That way, you can have a smooth stretch of ceiling from one side to the other of that open area now what you need, what you want, the layout that’s going to make your heart sing, of course, doesn’t necessarily relate to the building technology of the house you live in, but the openness or closedness of the house you live in right now is because of the building technology. Different technology, different possibilities, different assumptions about what is or is not, the right amount of openness in houses.

Around the same time that all of these mid-century houses were built, just as I described, other people were already trying to solve the problem. They solved it in such a mid-century way with premanufactured, engineered trusses. If you’re not familiar with this term, you’ve probably seen a stack of them going down the highway at some point, a big semi load with a stack of triangles made up of little triangles, all constructed from these days, usually two by fours that are hammered together with metal plates at each connection point.

These trusses, which a very short amount of googling has led me to being invented by Carol Sanford in Pompano Beach, Florida in the 1950s really changed the game for how we could span across larger spaces. Trusses themselves had been around for longer, but this type of residential roof.

Truss structure takes advantage of those triangle structures and having a bunch more triangle stuff going on in there to use only two by fours less wood, whereas the ceiling joists and rafters of a conventional mid-century house built in a stick frame style might have been, might have been just two by fours, or possibly two by sixes right under the roof, the rafter at the gable side, but possibly a two by eight spanning across above the ceiling. The new engineered trusses made it possible to go wider in span for less wood.

This is definitely a win for the construction industry, and they can go as a contractor recently called it to me wall to wall, meaning exterior wall to exterior wall. And that means that everything, all the divisions inside of the middle of the residential building, are essentially arbitrary. We still have a lot of divisions, because people like a bedroom to be surrounded on all six sides floor, four walls and a ceiling and soundproof, relatively speaking, but they don’t have to be.

And in the social side of your house, you can have a fully flat, open ceiling between your kitchen, your living room, your dining room and so on. Having the ability to open up those spaces naturally led designers to think, well, good, let’s just open up more spaces. And suddenly, as the engineered trust technology comes online in really more like the 1960s, we start to see a lot more open plan now.

This is actually nothing new in modernist housing, because there’s a lot of open plan action happening in the 1940s and 50s and in the 10s, 20s and 30s, for that matter, in post and beam structures in mixed use housing, in apartment buildings and in the kind of Cliff may Eichler post and beam residential structures we see in California even from the earliest part of the mid-century period. So in a way, the engineered trust system just brought to mass housing what had already been going on slightly earlier in the design of mid-century housing and did it in a way that was maybe less thoughtful, as with so much of mass market consumer goods.

And I would certainly classify the housing of the late 70s and onward in America as mass market consumer goods, the disposable mindset of the people designing and selling it has so little tailoring for the real human needs. Sometimes it always makes me think of Jurassic Park, the original one, the book, in fact, by Michael Crichton, or perhaps with the inimitable Jeff Goldblum, snarking that the scientists of Jurassic Park were so busy trying to figure out if they could, they never stopped to wonder if they should.

And so in the American housing of the post 1960s similarly, in the sort of conventional urban high rise apartment, we get a lot of open plan layouts that just exist because they can and not necessarily because they should. Now, again, I am not personally saying that I am anti open plan floor plan, but any design idea should have a purpose, and I think there was in real estate for many years, in housing development for many years, a sense that open plan was just inherently good, was fancy, was high end, was expensive, that you could take a house and remodel it by knocking spaces together, it would be better.

You could sell a house with big, wide open spaces, maybe big, wide, open, tall spaces, and it would be wonderful. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s in suburban northern Chicago, among other places, and that is, oh man, the constant glut of houses that were meant to be extremely high end, but were actually made out of legit ticky tacky walls that weren’t square to each other, so that there were holes in the corner where the drywall wasn’t mudded and taped properly, just really obviously wrong from the beginning.

Construction flaws. We’re also fundamentally built around the concept of bigger is always better. More is better. Taller is better. And this is where you get those two and three story McMansion entry atriums connected to nothing and the double height great rooms which were murdered, heat, unpleasantly echoey, and no one in my experience ever really wanted to linger in them.

Now, of course, I was a teenager, so we were always trying to get away from adult spaces. But when I would visit friends’ houses who lived in homes like that, we were always trying to get away to a bedroom or the basement, somewhere we could feel contained in a human scale, and I noticed that as we rushed through the great room and on beyond, my friend’s parents also tended to congregate away from those supposedly social gathering spaces. They weren’t having a glass of wine in front of the overly dramatic double height fieldstone hearth in the great room.

While we were in the basement watching movies. They were up in the oversized sofa sitting area in their master bedroom, or just in the kitchen, hanging out in a space where the ceiling was only eight feet and felt a little more contained by surrounding walls. So this is something I noticed anecdotally at the time. Now, with an architect’s analytical lens, I can say those spaces. Did not feel warm, welcoming human space.

Nevertheless, that concept of bigger, taller, wider, more open is better persisted for decades in American Housing culture. Only in the last couple of years, I think, has there been a real concerted pushback in the media, in popular culture, against the concept of open plan. And a lot of this came out of the pandemic. When people were trying to work from home, adults were trying to have multiple zoom meetings so they could do their job, while kids also in school did their work.

Ideally, not everybody should away in their bedroom, and everyone felt like suddenly their houses did not have enough close, away private space. I probably read a screed against open plan design in a dozen different sources in the first month of the shutdown stay home era, and it caused me to go record a podcast about how to create nooks in your house, how to design with furniture and things in your house, a little away space, a little cozy island in a too big space, maybe not giving you the soundproofing you need, but giving you a little bit of a sense of human scale in a too large area.

In a way, I think the concept of open plan was just a Goliath that was right for a David around that time, and obviously the pandemic was a moment when everyone suddenly realized, oh, wait, we need some privacy and separation inside our houses, and that’s less true now, because we have the ability to go back to work or to socialize. But I think this is a cultural shift. We are a bit more homebody oriented now.

We’re more Home Comfort aware. I still see big open floor plans featured in magazines and think pieces, but I do think that, well, I can pick on the McMansion all day long, and I will never be sorry for picking on a too big home, but you probably don’t live in one because you’re listening to a podcast about mid-century homes, and your mid-century home probably was less open plan than anything built in the 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s and beyond.

That doesn’t mean the open plan concept doesn’t affect you. Perhaps you live in an Eichler or other post and beam structure that feels a little too open in the social areas for your personal life. Or perhaps you live in a late 1950s era house that was built with a trust structure in its roof such that the original builder or remodeler was able to open up spaces inside the house beyond the level you prefer, or perhaps like a client I was just talking with, you’re thinking about a remodel and what has been suggested to you by a drafts person or a contractor who’s noticed that you have a trust structure in your roof is that you could blow all of your interior social spaces into one big open plan layout.

So we return to the Jurassic Park question. Yes, you could. Now let’s wonder if you should. I’m going to come from the example of a lovely design consultation call I had a couple of weeks ago. This was, as I mentioned earlier in the episode, one of those cases where someone with a relatively broken up spaces, you know, original layout concept brick ranch house is in the process of a big remodel, and they’re working with a contractor and also with a drafts person to, you know, create proper vision of what they’re going to do, and get permit plans and then construction plans and go.

But they had reached out to me because something was feeling a little off. They wanted some advice, and specifically, they wanted some vibe check, advice about how open the social area floor plan should be in this particular house, there’d already been probably a 1990s era remodel which had knocked together the two back rooms of the social part of the house, a kitchen, certainly, and maybe an eat in kitchen, or probably a den.

And along the front of the house there were two separate rooms, a living room organized around a hearth and a separate formal dining room you get to from the kitchen and then the garage beyond those social spaces on one side and opposite the social spaces the bedrooms fairly classic layout. So in the 90s remodel, they had knocked together the two back rooms and also elevated the ceiling up to the inner edge of the roof, in my opinion, going too high.

I like the idea of elevating the ceiling, and it’s one of the things you can get away with if you’ve got an early, mid-century stick frame roof structure, if you’ve got a roof made out of rafters and joists, not out of pre-engineered trusses. But in this case, the result was a really high triangle. It was kind of a steep-ish from a relative point of view, ranch roof anyway, and then they’d gone all the way up to the ceiling and created a long, narrow, high tube of space along the back of the house.

The plan proposed by the drafts person was basically do the same on the other side, knock out all the interior walls. Go. And this is not actually what I would recommend, even for someone who wants to make a really social hosting space, just taking what had been four rooms and making them into one bigger room does not actually give you the same functionality that those earlier four rooms were.

For one thing, when you think about how to furnish a space like that, we tend to like to put furniture in relationship to walls. Now, when I was just talking to you about mid-century furniture a couple of episodes ago, I advised you not to shove your mid-century furniture right up against the wall. But still, as I was looking at this floor plan, we kind of had then once all four spaces, the kitchen, the sort of den space, the family room and the dining room.

If none of them had any barriers or lines of sight breaks at all, what would be the difference between the den and them and the family room, the den and the living room? They don’t have a formal distinction. They don’t have a space use anymore, and it wouldn’t actually feel great to have any relationship to that hearth at all anymore. Plus, he wanted to put a TV into the space. It would have needed to be the other side of the house, on another wall. How on earth do you create a seating arrangement around that?

Similarly, creating a fun sitting space in or near the kitchen would feel at odds with he did want to have a little bit more of a sit down hosting dining space. So the pros of opening up all that space are the classic American more is more attitude, let’s make a bigger open space. Why wouldn’t you? And you certainly can, from a structural point of view, nothing is stopping a contractor from coming into a space like that and removing all of the interior walls of that social space and letting the roof span from wall to wall. However, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So I wanted to look at it a different way.

How much of this right now, admittedly, to closed space, did we need to open to achieve the result he was looking for? And as we studied the floor plan a little longer, it became pretty clear that we really only needed to make a bit more of an open connection between the family room and the living room, not even removing the entire wall, but just creating a nice, generous, more than double wide doorway opening between them that would allow for two separate furnishing areas, a slightly dressier, more adult sitting room, greeting room, family room at the front and a more casual TV space flows neatly from the kitchen flows nicely out to the back porch sitting area in the back.

We might want to open up some of the walls around the dining room, but not all of them, so that it could continue to feel like its own space. And we could borrow a little bit. Or we might connect the kitchen and the dining room to each other, leave more of a division between the dining room and the family room at the front of the house.

And sort of let each individual room flow into the next one, rather than having all of them be a big, blank, empty event space in the center. This has a couple of advantages. For one thing, it’s going to cost way less. There’s less engineering to go on in the roof lines. There’s less removal and repair of floor materials and wall materials. This house had a really lovely classic what wouldn’t have been considered fancy at the time, but it’s pain in the butt to replace now, narrow strip oak floor looked like it was in great shape.

All it needed was a refinish. If we start tearing out walls willy nilly, we get to a place where we’re patching so much that it starts to make more sense to replace the floors entirely. They will not, for a reasonable budget, be replaced with something better than is there right now. And it also doesn’t necessarily require to get a sense of openness between rooms. We’re not necessarily required to make a floor to ceiling opening.

We might in certain spaces, but in other areas, we might simply punch through a generous interior house window and put a bookshelf or a planter or some sort of storage unit underneath, which means we don’t need to replace flooring where a wall once was. In every case, as we talked it through, I could see more and more that this house did not need a blowout, open plan layout. Nor did the owner really want that, but he was being encouraged to choose it, just because it’s the simplest thing to do when you’re working in CAD when you’re a drafts person looking at a house, trying to make a change, trying to meet the owner’s requirements.

Deleting walls is so easy, but in the three dimensional spaces of a mid-century home, simply removing things isn’t always the best idea. More isn’t always better. For example, the other thing I might have recommended to him was actually to lower the elevated ceiling along the back room of the house.

Right now it’s elevated all the way up to the roof line, and it creates too big of a contrast, too much of a slope for such a relatively small space as one half of a ranch house. I prefer when I do recommend that my clients think about elevating a ceiling that they don’t bring it up all the way to the roof line, but they bring it up to more like a one or two in 12 slope that’s more gentle.

So and if it meets a wall at the midpoint where it’s going to come down to an eight foot ceiling on the other side, it’s less of a harsh, jagged cliff edge condition one way or another, it was interesting to have what I originally looked at when I saw the flans before we had our call start, a simple rubber stamp for blowing open a space turned into a conversation about how little could be done in order to make the changes that he really wanted to get to, which is absolutely always the goal of Master Plan thinking at any scale. This same question, how much to open up between connected spaces, has come up for me in two recent master plan design projects that pop into my head the minute I think the words open plan.

And in the first the house had a wall to wall trust structure, so we weren’t required to keep any divisions between rooms that we didn’t want. Still fascinating. Side note in that house, the builder had chosen to put in faux headers to create doorway openings, big, wide doorway openings, both between the entry and the living room, beyond facing out into the backyard and between the kitchen and dining room. I really assumed that they were structurally necessary, until we did a little exploratory demolition and found out, Nope, it’s an engineered wall to wall truss in the ceiling.

And then we took a drywall off in the first part of construction. This is a house where I’m getting to have a little bit more long term interaction with the design, which has been really fun. And sure enough, they just chose to make it look like they needed to close those rooms off. It was a, I don’t know, a traditionalist, retro throwback design, pretend structure. Anyway, in those cases, I absolutely endorsed knocking out a fake header so that we could have smooth ceiling between the entry area and the living room and between the kitchen and the dining room.

That said we didn’t necessarily want to create complete openness between those spaces, because then we started to dissolve what the purpose of each individual space is, particularly with the entry, which comes in through a double door with a big double window next to it. If that space walked straight into the living room with no interruption whatsoever, it would start to feel pretty hard to greet the UPS man at the door without welcoming them into your whole entire life.

So instead of creating a full closed off wall, we assume pretty much most of the people who knock on the door are gonna be relatively welcome, and we put in a nice little slat wall divider that just obscures slightly what’s happening beyond that space and defines the division between entry and living room a little bit. It’ll also be divided up with a flooring change from one space to another, which again, gives a sense of, here’s the area you’ve been welcomed into.

First, come on into the foyer. Take your shoes off here. Come on and step into the living room or follow me into the kitchen. I’ll get you a drink. And having that kind of subtle layering counter intuitively can actually make it easier to let someone into the house, as opposed to the feeling of when someone walks in and sees everything that’s going on, it sometimes becomes harder to let anyone want to come up to the front door in the first place.

I had a similar discussion with a master plan from end of last year where we had the ability to blow out a lot of wall divisions. We had the ability to make it basically an open space from coming in the front door, walking into a dining room, corner, living room, the kitchen, in that case, was often another location. It was a bit of a different not quite a classic ranch design.

But what we ended up deciding was no we actually did want to put in a non-structural divider wall, not a solid wall, again, a slat wall, which is wonderful for creating privacy from certain angles, and allowing you to do some book storage and some clothing storage, maybe put a bench in front of it, but it gives you the definition of room that you want, and it allows you to have a little bit of a sense of surprise.

In this case, the house was on a relatively busy road, set quite far back from the street, so no one was ever going to show up at their front door unless they were invited, but they wanted to have the sense of when someone comes to the front door, you say, front door, you say, Hey, come on in. You let them in, and as you lead them through into the living room, they see right through the house too, in that case, Gulf Coast open water beyond a pretty astonishing view that you want to have a little bit of a surprise about.

You don’t want to give it all away at the front door. So one way or another, even when you have the ability to pop open more spaces, to connect, more spaces within your house, you want to think about what is the condition that you choose to have.

How much do you want to have sight lines? Do you want to be able to see from where you sit on the sofa and watch television all the way to the kitchen sink to see the dishes that are piled up and need to be done before bedtime? Or do you want more privacy? Do you want someone coming to your front door to be able to see the kitchen sink? This is often one of the most pressing open plan floor plan questions and the biggest open plan detractors typically go to, you don’t want everyone to see your kitchen sink from the front door question, but I think that’s a little it’s a little reductive.

But one thing to consider when you’re wondering about the open plan options possibilities is, what do you want the connections between spaces to be? When do you want them to be all one area where you’re throwing a big party and everyone can be part of the same conversation, and when, even if you were throwing a big party, do you want there to be smaller, micro conversations going on, and certainly, when you’re not throwing a big party, how do you want your life to go? These are the questions that come up in the master plan process.

So what I really want you to think about in your house is, doesn’t feel too closed off. It might well you might have the opportunity to share light, to share views, to share the ability to have a conversation across the house when needed, and all of those things can be wonderful, but it doesn’t necessarily lead you to a full open plan move, which is always going to be a big construction project on a mid-century house.

You might be able to make a huge win by opening up a wall a little bit. Perhaps pocketing a beam, perhaps disguising the columns that support a beam over a wider opening with not just putting them at even intervals, but sort of giving yourself an open spacing, a slat wall, a library wall, a planter wall. The possibilities are so many but thinking about what kind of openness you’re looking for sound connection, light connection, view connection, walkthrough connection, and then going from there is going to give you more agency over the binary question of open plan versus not in many cases.

And I’ll throw a few sketched examples into the show notes blog post we have suggested for houses we’re working on with a post and beam structure for Eichler or likeler houses, that while you want an open connection from one side of the house in some places, in others, you do not.

You can infill thoughtfully with a piece of structure that’s not a wall or a piece of building element that’s not a wall, a partial height room divider, a floating something that spans between columns or is suspended between floor and ceiling, something that’s going to interrupt an unpleasant sight line, a light line that makes it easier to furnish a space, that makes it easier to have a sort of a working kitchen area and pleasant formal-ish as formal as mid-century houses ever get sitting area and to keep the different uses, the different purposes of your home, separate from each other.

One way or another, you will probably find that for the number of people living in a house, each of those people, each of those persons, will have their own preference for how open or close it should be.

You’re going to have to mitigate between those to figure out what is the right answer for yourself. But if you want to make sure you’ve got enough privacy, that you’ve got room for simple furnishing, that you’ve got enough spaces to live through the different cycles of your day nicely, and if you want to make sure that you get one of the primary benefits of a mid-century house, which is a cozy, livable feeling, even while having a relatively open floor plan, you’re also still going to be looking for, where do the corners exist?

Where do you need to block a sight line? Is there somewhere you need to lower a roof or a ceiling component. Where do you need to define a space with light fixtures?

And if you want advice on that, go back and check out my episode on how to use light fixtures in mid-century spaces from a couple of episodes last season. That would have been episode 2004 or, by the way, as I’m recommending other episodes, if you’re interested in how to learn how to see the structure of your home. You might want to check out the episode I did Ooh quite a while ago, three or four years ago, episode 906, which is entitled, can I open up a wall and other questions about your structure?

So it’ll give you some of the things I talked about today, but also more of a how to view your house for its structural necessities. But also I notice as I flip the show notes of that page, it’s got a bunch of examples of, in my opinion, the right way to elevate a ceiling in a mid-century house, which is of signal importance when you’re thinking about opening or creating greater connections between spaces you really want to consider the ceiling line, and particularly in a basement or in any low ceiling space you don’t want too much width side to side or length front to back without getting more height, or you’re going to end up with a pancake space that feels artificially lower than it needs to be.

All right, that’s a little digression. I would love to hear your thoughts on the benefit or lack thereof of open plan houses, whether you’ve had good experiences, if you’ve lived in a house with an open plan, and now you don’t, and you wish you did, whether you’ve opened up the floor plan of your mid-century house and how you feel about it, I want to know so reach out and let me know how your open floor plan suits you, or how much your closed plan. Hmm, drives you nuts, and we can continue the open plan debate.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to should you have an open plan in your house, but there’s probably a right way and a wrong way to make your house more open or to close it up, if that’s your goal. So hopefully, if you pop through to the show notes page and check out a few of the examples there. You’ll get some inspiration for how to create more openness and how to interrupt too much openness to create pleasant spaces in and around your mid-century home.

For our mid-century house feature this week, I thought I’d stick with a question of what happens when you change up the floor plan and highlight the laundry drop, which is a feature you’ll only have if you happen to live in a mid-century house that has a basement that originally had laundry in the basement, but these little built in tunnels, holes in the spaces in between the studs can be so fun and so practical I have rarely met a household that has a laundry drop that doesn’t really enjoy it and find it to be a useful feature that they want to preserve.

Unless they, like many people, when they’re planning their remodel, are planning to bring the laundry from the basement up to the main floor, which there’s nowhere to drop it to.

If you have not ever lived near one, you’ll just be walking down the hallway in a classic mid-century Midwestern house, and there’ll be a little wooden cupboard door built into the wall in the middle of nowhere between two bedrooms. And you look at it, and you think, what could be hidden in that wall, and why would you make a cabinet that small?

But it’s usually 12 inches by 12 inches, and it fits a little opening that literally just falls down between the walls. Often there is metal ducting inside. Sometimes there is not, and I’ve seen them in mid-century, houses that have multiple floors go from the second floor down to the basement, and really just sort of get the laundry out of bedrooms, get the laundry out of bathrooms, make an easy way to drop things out of your life and into the space where they will be cleaned and dealt with. Then, of course, somebody does have to haul them back upstairs. That’s the reason why.

On the house I’m working on most currently, we’re putting a laundry system right into the owner’s bedroom closet so clothes can be washed exactly where they’re used and discarded and put back away again instantly, with three steps. But in a house where the laundry is in the basement, it can be a really nice labor saving device and save the sort of responsibility of someone having to go around and collect up everyone else’s dirty clothes. Dirty clothes just go into the laundry drop. It’s such a wonderful, simple solution, and it really feels like the classic kind of all you had to do was think of it. It didn’t really require any extra structure or any extra planning.

It does require the right spot. I have seen these show up in depending on the layout of the upstairs and downstairs, in the floor of a cabinet underneath the bathroom sink is another good place to have a laundry drop so it just drops right out into the ceiling of the basement. And often in cases where the location that was perfect for a laundry drop doesn’t line up specifically to anything happening in the laundry area of the basement, there’ll be a place where a basket a rolling cart could often sit and capture everything as it falls.

When we think about remodels for mid-century basements, here at mid mod Midwest, we are always off and checking where did the laundry drop fall, and can we if we’re moving the laundry to another spot, or if it was never actually that close to the washer and dryer space that we’re keeping?

Can we preserve that as a little cabinet, as a little built in, as a way, among other things, to have a reason to break up an inconveniently large, wide, but not tall, open plan layout of the basement. One way to break it up is to put a built in that captures laundry as it falls.

So you can just open a door, pull out the cart that’s holding the dirty clothes and wheel it right over to the laundry area in another part of the basement. These I don’t really have any gorgeous pictures of mid-century laundry drops. It’s more of a brilliant concept than a brilliant look, but I’ll throw a few examples into the show notes page and let me know if a laundry drop was part of your childhood, part of your past home experience, or if you have a laundry drop point in the mid-century house you live in now, and if you love it, I’d love to hear about that.

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