Throughout most of their history, single-family homes were designed to create a series of compartments where privacy could be found at every turn and valuable square footage was taken up with hallways and other inefficiencies. They were places where you could get away from each other and shut rooms off to save energy. They also tended to be somewhat dark.
Over the last 10 years or so, the walls have come down, creating open spaces that facilitate togetherness rather than isolation. Walk through any sizeable home of the last half-decade, and you'll see how the traffic flows easily, leading to and from the home's nerve center: the kitchen. Not only is the floor plan freer and more welcoming, but it's brighter, infused with the light of whole walls of windows.
According to home designer Troy Farnsworth, these architectural changes had their root right here.
"Not until somebody in the Northwest realized the importance of natural light and its impact on personality and the way it affects our day did we start taking walls out," he says. Also, the prevalence of double-income families made people want to spend more of their waking hours with each other.
Accompanying these societal trends - the emphasis on family and friends, and the renewed appreciation of the home as the family nest - have come advances in building methods and products to make this open architecture possible. Window manufacturers have made great strides in producing big windows with amazing energy efficiency. Over the course of a few years, builders were able to create high ceilinged expanses that flooded the interior with natural light, yet preserved the interior's comfortable temperature. The glass in these windows also filter out harmful ultraviolet radiation that fades the colors on furniture and carpeting.
Farnsworth also points out that the trusses currently being manufactured to support roofs and floors have evolved beyond the capabilities of traditional milled lumber, allowing architects to design homes with longer spans and fewer supporting walls.
The result is that home owners have a greater than ever range of architectural choices. And what they're choosing is the great room concept with the connected kitchen. Far from homes of old, where the kitchen was a place where the cook worked in isolation while family and guests waited in the living room, the kitchen in modern homes is a place to congregate and to oversee activities in the great room and other smaller rooms nearby.
Home owners also are choosing what to get rid of. Case in point: the formal living room.
"Living rooms are becoming nothing but a showplace of furniture that nobody sits on. Their separateness means they're used less. Basically, they're a thing of the past." Farnsworth says.
The next room in line for extinction may be the formal dining room, although it may take a while. "People are more reluctant to get rid of formal dining rooms, but that is a generational thing that will change. The next generation will live more informally, and will be more than happy to combine all the dining spaces into one general area," says Alan Mascord, Alan Mascord Design Associates, Inc.
With the kitchen/great room as the centerpiece of the home, designers are looking at ways to build in other functions and still maintain the flow. One feature is a room that adjoins the great room, such as a library with pocket doors. Open the doors and it expands the great room. Close them and you have a private area. This is a perfect solution for entertaining couples with children: the kids can play in the adjoining room while the adults are in the great room, yet they're close by if needed.
The idea is to create flexible space - to have rooms that have multiple purposes that can be opened up or closed off as needed. In the example above, the library can also act as a den, a craft room, a gift wrapping room or home office, and can include a Murphy bed for overnight guests. If it's big enough, it can also serve as a bedroom for an older parent who moves in with one of the children.
Stan Scrutton, designer for the Shelburne Company's entry in the year's Street of Dreams, calls his version of this flexible space a "keeping room." It extends off the kitchen, and is less formal than the great room. It's also half the size. It's an intimate area to read or watch television, or where children can be freer to make a mess than in the more formal great room. It has its own fireplace, so it can serve as a cozier place to gather with guests after dinner than the expansive great room.
Butler's pantries are another form of satellite area that form a transition from the great room to the dining room. They can be enclosed, but for a more open feel they can be designed as islands with little more than a wet bar and some cabinets. The butler's pantry is easily accessed from both rooms, and the separation it creates is much more subtle than a room of walls and doors.
"So with this layout, you can make a transition from any of these areas without feeling separated from family or company," Farnsworth says.
To create an even greater sense of spaciousness, designers are linking the great room to the outside. It's not unusual - particularly in warmer climates such as California - to have a great room with a whole wall of French doors that open up to the deck. This becomes an extension of the living space, and a great place to congregate when the weather's pleasant.
The whole idea of openness also means getting rid of space wasters. Instead of having a hallway, for example, you can arrange the house so that bedrooms open to a larger community space. Mascord said that idea originated in California, and he dismissed it at first. "They expected you to walk through the great room to get to the master bedroom. But it's commonplace now," he says.
Stairways also waste space. The solution, according to Farnsworth: have floating stairs that connect only to the top and bottom floors, leaving room on all sides for other uses.
Open architecture fits another societal trend: the aging of the baby boomer. The design elements boomers are requesting to accommodate the future include a master bedroom on the main floor, wider hallways, larger doorways, lower countertops and more accessible cabinets, Farnsworth says.
Then it becomes a place to spend a lifetime.