How to create the Ultimate Open Plan Living Space

When I was living in my flat with a young toddler, our kitchen was a separate room. This made things really difficult when my little one wanted to run around while I was making something to eat. And how I wished I could just let him roam around while I was trying to do the dishes. I got around it by putting the bouncer into the kitchen so that he could at least stay in one place but it was not ideal.

In my current home, the entire ground floor is an open-plan space. And it’s really, really great. I now have another toddler and he is crawling at the moment. While I’m in the kitchen, he just crawls up and down the entire open plan space and so there’s quite a lot of freedom. The additional benefit of having an open plan multifunctional space is that you can also have multiple people within the room, performing different activities, but still within hearing distance of each other.

The first thing to do when designing an open plan space is to think about what you’re going to do with that space. What sort of activities and tasks are you going to perform in that room? The back area of my house is dedicated to cooking because there’s a kitchen there, I have a small office area, a dining table, and a play area for my toddler. So write down a list of all of the things that you plan to do within that space.

 

 

The next step is to take that list of activities and tasks and think about the sort of furniture and the storage that you need in order to be able to perform those activities within that space. So if you’re a family that usually spends your Saturday nights around the dining table playing board games, then you might want a storage area to be able to keep those board games there.

If you’re somebody that absolutely loves entertaining, and you love to have people over for a meal. Then you might want to have an extra cabinet for dishes and platters.

Start thinking about where the furniture will go in that space. I usually like to imagine the space is cut down into small imaginary rooms. It helps to visualise where the furniture is going to be. This is called Zoning. When you imagine that the walls are there within the space, it helps you to place the furniture within those little rooms.

This lays the foundation of laying out an open plan space.