The Case for Rooms
It’s time to end the tyranny of open-concept interior design.
If someone asked me in 2013 whether or not I thought the open floor plan would still be popular, I would have said no. Domestic architecture seemed to be taking a turn toward the rustic. In 2018, “Farmhouse” and “Craftsman” modern designs, harkening back to the American vernacular tradition (complete with shiplap walls), are a tour-de-force.
Much has been written about the open floor plan: how it came to be, why
it is bad (or good), whether it should or shouldn’t be applied to
existing housing. The open floor plan as we currently understand it—an
entry-kitchen-dining-living combination that avoids any kind of
structural separation between uses—is only a few decades old. Prior to
the last 25 years, an “open floor plan” meant a living configuration
without
doors; now the term has come to mean a living configuration without
walls. I will refer to the latter from now on as an “open concept,” in order to differentiate it from a traditional open floor plan.
An open-concept house in Massachusetts in 2005. Photo by Michael Dwyer/AP.
The interior-wall-free open concept became popular
starting in the 1970s, evolving from the cedar contemporary homes known
for their tall ceilings and windows, and from
styled ranches
whose steeper rooflines allowed for newly in-vogue cathedral ceilings.
Overall, the open concept was a reaction against years of small,
low-ceilinged living, which felt restricting and stuffy to a new
generation of homebuyers.
That this would start with the kitchen is not
surprising. Historically, the kitchen was the last room to be integrated
into the open concept. Living and dining rooms began to converge as
early as the beginning of the 1900s, when changes in architectural taste
and the development of mass-industrialized housing production favored a
more compact home design than the rambling, formal “hall-and-parlor”
layout of Victorian times.
Wealthy families in the 18th and 19th
centuries had homes with several rooms for specific purposes, such as
parlors, libraries, drawing rooms, smoking rooms, and servants’
quarters. Then, new building materials and construction technologies led
to shifts in architectural taste that favored more continuous interior
spaces: First came the Arts & Crafts movement, then Modernism.
Social changes that arose with modern industrial capitalism, such as the
transition away from live-in servants to commuting wage-workers, also
reduced the number of rooms in upper-class houses. However,
in the homes of the working and lower-middle classes, these same
factors of social change and modernization created an opposite
progression. The story of common houses is a story of walls.
The number of rooms in working-class homes increased with the number of
products and amenities that became readily affordable through
industrialization, modernization, and mass production. The common house,
as well as working-class living environments such as dwelling houses
and tenements, only had one to three rooms: a kitchen space and a living
and/or sleeping space, which were multipurpose, used for working as
well as living.
Beginning in the 1860s, work increasingly took place outside of the home, and the application of mass production to housing reduced building costs. During this period, the average number of rooms increased, to three to five: a kitchen, a living room, and one or two bedrooms. Common vernacular examples of this period (1860-1900) include the worker’s cottage, the shotgun house, the Temple-and-Wing house, and early examples of the four-box and Foursquare. In these early industrial-era homes, the threshold between working-class and middle-class was determined by amenities like a dining room or a front porch.
By the 1900s and 1910s, mass single-family housing shipped to the site
by rail and truck had come into its own. Now sizes and types of wood,
nails, and other construction materials had become widely standardized
across the building industry. During the second half of the 19th
century, a key development—
balloon framing—allowed
for more inexpensive construction, since the cheap materials (nails,
studs, and 2x4s) were readily available and did not required skilled
labor to assemble, unlike timber framing. Long, lightweight studs and
the clever, basket-like technique of assembly enabled taller and longer homes to be built by as few as two people and with relatively little waste.
Two of the most common and recognizable types of vernacular American housing—the bungalow and the Foursquare—became massively popular during this time. The average number of rooms per house increased once again. Working-class homes now had three to five rooms; middle-class homes, six to eight. Whether or not a home was determined to be working- or middle-class depended on whether it had indoor plumbing (bathrooms!) or electricity, both of which had become increasingly available.
Architectural historians place a great deal of emphasis on the
bungalow, often citing it as the beginning of the “open” floor plan,
since many bungalows omitted the closed wall between the living and
dining areas. However, these historians focus on high-style Arts &
Crafts bungalows, which featured more inventive architecture, and ignore
the fact that in working-and-middle class bungalows, the average number
of individual (closed) rooms increased as a whole.
Only in more elaborate middle-class bungalows is the wall between the
living and dining room separated by a partial wall or colonnade. This
feature was more expensive to construct, because it required structural
loads to be redistributed to other walls or fixtures. Structural reasons
in general were why, in common houses, open spaces would not become
more widespread until changes in construction made them more affordable.
Even as plans in elite houses continued to open up throughout the 1920s,
the common house retained its interior walls. Why? In many respects,
closed rooms existed to maintain a semblance of privacy. Homes were
smaller, but families were bigger than they are now: The average number
of people in an American household was five in 1880 and 4.3 in 1920;
today, it’s 2.5. The reason why the first door to be omitted was
frequently that between the living and dining rooms was because those
rooms were considered “public” spaces, a holdover from the
hall-and-parlor Victorian times.
Work areas, such as the kitchen, and private spaces, like bedrooms and
bathrooms, were always closed off to avoid guests seeing the mess of
meal-making or, heaven forbid, the “unmentionable room” (the bathroom).
By the end of the 1920s, the large, old-growth trees that produced the
long studs central to the technique of balloon framing became scarce,
leading to new techniques that could be completed with smaller spans of
wood. Today’s style of framing, platform framing, enabled more flexible
room shapes and sizes.
The small
minimal traditional houses
of the 1930s through early ‘50s employed this new framing technique on a
mass, federally-subsidized scale. These small homes relied on interior
walls to ensure spatial privacy (not to mention aural, olfactory, and
visual privacy) in cramped situations. The closed floor plan also
represented security, isolation, and control, concepts that were
important in a moment that emerged from the Depression and then World
War II, and deepened through a period of intense racial tension and Cold
War paranoia.
The ranch and the split-level, both of which originated in the
mid-1940s, drastically changed patterns of dwelling in the American
home. This is often cited as the spark that lit the fire of the open
concept. The reorientation of the ideal American home, from vertical, two-story Cape Cod to horizontal, one-story ranch, certainly did open up
floor plans. By this point, a continuous living and dining space was
commonplace.
However, one room remained stubbornly closed for at least another decade: the kitchen. Kitchens have been closed for most of the history of common housing.
In elite houses, kitchens were places of work, where servants were kept
out of sight of residents and guests, often relegated to the cellar or
guesthouse. This functional separation was continued in middle-class
houses, even as live-in servants became a feature of the past. Most
kitchens are placed in the rear of the house. Access to a rear kitchen
door allowed for faster disposal of waste and easy ventilation; also,
deliveries could be made directly to the kitchen to save labor.
Kitchens began to open up and become public spaces in the home because
of cultural shifts regarding consumption. Domestic theorist Christine
Frederick’s term “creative waste” sums up this new mentality: It was the
moral obligation of the 1920s housewife to buy and discard products,
one that elevated the concept of waste as being positive, indulgent, and
stimulating to the economy.
This attitude merged with new technological advances. When inventions
such as central air conditioning and improved fire suppression became
commonplace, the kitchen, no longer a place of shame and no longer
reliant upon the ventilation provided by the kitchen door, began to
shift to different parts of the home. The attached garage often replaced the backyard as the common point of entry into the kitchen.
Room layout, which more often than not had its roots in social and
practical constraints, became liberated due to these new cultures of
consumption and technologies of comfort. Without these developments, the
open concept would have never been possible in the first place.
If closed floor plans are considered such a nuisance these days, why
did they prevail for almost 100 years in single-family working- and
middle-class suburban housing? The answer: closed floor plans make a lot
of sense, from both an environmental and a living perspective.
We are going to need to consume a lot less energy if we want to stem
the tide of global climate change. The good news is, humans survived for
thousands of years without air conditioning and cars, and thus can
learn some lessons from the past. The closed floor plan, especially the
closed kitchen, can help save energy by the simple principle of not
heating and cooling rooms that are not currently in use, as well as by
isolating rooms we want to keep warm or cool.
As cultures of consumption change and people become more
environmentally conscious, homes must change to reflect this. Designing
homes around “entertaining” that happens only a handful of times a year
is a wasteful, yet still mindbogglingly popular practice. When people
come to visit, they are there to see you, not your open concept.
It may not be as glamorous, but the closed kitchen is actually more
efficient for cooking than the sprawling, open “chef’s kitchens” that
are so popular. It enables whoever does the cooking to take fewer steps
to perform tasks. The chef’s kitchen follows the wasteful logic of the
1920s: Instead of moving the sink closer to the stove, builders install a
pot filler or a second sink in a center island. Instead of closing in
the main kitchen to isolate the disorder of food preparation, developers
are building “mess kitchens” for this purpose.
The “labor-saving” elements of open floor plans are in some ways
labor-creating. A large, single, continuous space is harder to get and
keep clean. Messes and smells are no longer isolated, but can be easily
tracked throughout the entire first floor of a large home. Less house in
general means less house to clean.
Not separating cooking, living, and dining is also an acoustical
nightmare, especially in today’s style of interior design, which avoids
carpet, curtains, and other soft goods that absorb sound. This is
especially true of homes that do not have separate formal living and
dining spaces but one single continuous space. Nothing is more maddening
than trying to read or watch television in the tall-ceilinged living
room with someone banging pots and pans or using the food processor 10
feet away in the open kitchen.
Instead of these—space-wasting, specialized rooms that are used
relatively sparingly—why not just build common rooms with walls and
doors? If you want to escape something unpleasant, you can do so without
feeling banished or isolating yourself from everyone else. Sometimes,
true freedom means putting up a few barriers.
Kate Wagner is an architecture and design critic based in Baltimore. She is the author of the architecture blog McMansion Hell.
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