Your home… with living:room

BBC2 ran a series called ‘Home for Life’ recently, where brand consultants, Jamie Anley and Phil Nutley, helped homeowners move past the bland Magnolia School of Interior Decor and put a personal stamp on their homes. Watching the first of these programmes, where a couple struggled with the living room of a fairly typical home, I was struck by another problem aspect of modern housing – are we more concerned with how our homes look than how they work?

Do we even think about how our homes work? We pick one that seems to have the right amount of space for the things we want to do – eat, sleep, play etc., then decide which rooms will do what and put Stuff in – easy!

On the face of it, yes, it sounds easy but where we put Stuff and, indeed, the size, shape and location of the rooms have a bigger  impact on how we use them than we might realise.

Maybe you never got further than ‘Will I be able to fit everything in?’ or ‘Can I see the TV from there?’ But when it comes to planning a room, a number of factors play a part:

• What do you want to use the room for?
• Who will be using it?
• How often is it used?
• How much space do you really have?
• Can you move around easily?
• Is it pleasant to be in?
• Are there any safety issues?
• Is there enough natural light and ventilation?

And there are less tangible forces at work too. Think about your living room or bedroom design – where is the sofa or bed? In a typical home, they’re most likely positioned against the wall with the most free space and there is a simple psychological reason for this – we feel safe when we have something solid like a wall behind us.

I see this all the time in my local cafe where half the tables are arranged along the side walls and half are located in the middle of the room. I’ve never yet seen a customer pick a table in the middle of the room, if a table along the wall was free!

It’s a defensive measure, something that’s hot-wired into our psyche as part of our ‘fight or flight’ instinct – if we can’t see what’s behind us we may be vulnerable from that direction but when we know exactly what’s back there, we can focus our energy elsewhere. It’s particularly true of the places where we want to relax and rest – why do you think our ancestors made their homes in caves?

Early Ancestors put a personal stamp on their Homes..

The threat of large, toothy predators having somewhat diminished in recent years, this basic instinct nevertheless holds true. At a purely practical level, in a living room design, locating a sofa against a wall means we’re less likely to have the wits scared out of us by someone brushing past unexpectedly while we’re sitting there.

Wall space then is one of the most valuable parts of a room – it dictates how we use it and how flexible it is to change. But, in our homes, there is a lot of competition for this usable space – doors, windows, chimneys, radiators – all of these can restrict how and where we place furniture when planning a room and how useable it is as a result.

The other crucial factor determining how much useful and usable space we have in our homes is movement through and between rooms – circulation. As more and more homes skirt the dividing line between open plan and traditional layouts – by knocking down walls or opening them up to link rooms together – the impact of bad circulation on our homes has increased.

The golden rule with circulation is that it should happen around the main function areas of a room, not through them. Where a circulation route cuts across the activity area, it limits the way that room can be used – more circulation means less usable space.

A Typical Kitchen - Bad Circulation v. Good Circulation

In this example of a Typical Kitchen, both sketches show the various routes that someone might take through the kitchen to the garden at the top of the plan or to a utility room at the side.

On the left, almost every route interferes with the use of the kitchen. Why is this a problem? Well, given that this is where we handle sharp knives, hot pans and kettles of boiling water, the last thing we need is the smaller members of our family careening about in our path.

On the right, a different kitchen design in the same space makes it possible to move through the room without interfering with either the working area of the kitchen or someone sitting at the table. The island unit also allows us to keep an eye on kids playing at the table or chat to friends, instead of working facing away from the room.

What I noticed, watching that first episode of ‘Home for Life’, was that the living room – the room in which the family spent most of their free time – was a perfect storm of unusable space. The drawings below show the approx. floor layout for the house – circulation routes are shown by the dotted lines & blue arrows and the red lines show usable wall space in the living room.

Floor Plan - Before Makeover

Before the makeover, the living room had virtually no usable wall space, as each wall is interrupted by a window, a chimney, doors etc. The sofa ended up in the only spot available – forming an island in the middle of the room, surrounded by activity on all sides – hardly an ideal spot to relax!

Floor Plan - After Makeover

After the makeover, the situation is not much better – the redundant chimney has been removed to create some usable wall space but the other problem areas haven’t been tackled. The furniture is now lined up along the one usable wall, like a waiting room, and anyone sitting, watching TV is still likely to be disturbed by others moving about the house.

Now the aim of the programme wasn’t to improve the value or solve design problems but it seemed to me to be a lost opportunity – when carrying out extensive decorative work anyway, it would have been the ideal time to fix the problem and make their home work.

Here’s what I would have done:

Floor Plan - Quick Fix Option

See the difference?

The Quick Fix blocks up the door from the living room to the dining room and creates a new door from the kitchen instead – a relatively simple job that would certainly have fit within their budget for the makeover. The living room is no longer the centre of a spaghetti junction and instead becomes a destination within the house. Now the family can:

• Move through the house without having to cross the living room,
• Sit comfortably or have a conversation without being disturbed and -
• See what’s going on and who’s moving about instead of sitting with their backs to the rest of the house.

With a bigger budget, they could have gone one step further:

Floor Plan - Max. Value Option

The Maximum Value option takes the partition wall between the kitchen and dining room away altogether (subject to a structural survey), creating a large open plan kitchen dining room adjacent to the garden – a requirement that is top of the family home buyers’ wish list. It gives double the value – the family have the use and enjoyment of this space while they live here and it has ready-made appeal to their target market, if they ever decide to move on.

The Quick Fix option could easily be upgraded to the Max. Value option at a later date, as need and funds dictate. And for a Deluxe version, knock the wall between the window & door in the kitchen (this would require structural support) and insert sliding, bi-fold doors to open the whole room up to the garden.

The beauty of all these options is that they don’t require planning permission.*

Try these simple exercises on a floor plan of your home to identify usable wall space & circulation routes – you may be surprised at what you find!

On ‘Home for Life’, the finished house looked lovely and the owners were delighted with the change but the basic problem of how they use their front room remained unresolved. By focusing on how the room looked instead of how it worked, they missed an opportunity to add value to their home and improve their overall quality of life.

I think this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of design:

Good design is how something works, not simply how it looks.

I applaud the ‘Home for Life’ series for encouraging homeowners to think of their homes as places that reflect who they are, not just what they’re worth. As the sketches above illustrate, small changes can reap big rewards and needn’t cost the earth. I firmly believe now, more than ever, it’s important to ensure that the money we spend on our homes improves our experience of them and, in doing so, adds value.

Note: I have no connection to the ‘Home for Life’ programme and these observations are made simply as a viewer of the series.

* These changes could be carried out under Exempt Development in the Republic of Ireland – if carrying out similar work, please check with your local planning authority.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in:

The Elephant in the Room 1: The Bad Extension

The Elephant in the Room 2: Spaced Out

Is Your Home an iPhone or a Model T Ford?

Did you find this article useful? Do you have any any pet peeves about housing? Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this subject or any other home improvement or design issues you’d like to know more about.