Open Floor House Plans Create easy flow in your Home

Open floor plans dominate new home design and increase the flow for family members to interact

Open floor house plans incorporate several “rooms” in the same shared area. Typically, the dining room, kitchen, and living room are brought together to make one spacious area sometimes referred to as a great room. Since light and vertical space make any room seem larger, many architects of open floor house plans also include lofty ceilings, grand windows and skylights to make the great room seem even greater.

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If you’re brainstorming about your dream house plans, you’ll appreciate the list of open floor plan benefits that follows.

1. The Ideal Layout for Entertaining

Have you ever noticed the flow of social butterflies at a good party? The easy ability to move from group to group makes for a great shindig. In this way, your social life may even improve with open floor house plans. Designers recommend an open floor plan for those who plan on hosting plenty of social rendezvous.

2. Foster Relationships with Comfortable Shared Space

Follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs – foster interaction through open floor plans. At the Apple-owned Pixar building, Jobs placed everything important – the mailboxes, the coffee shop, the cafeteria – in an atrium in the center of the building. This brought together employees who wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to meet. Jobs recognized that an open floor plan throws together people in a positive way.

Jobs’ goal was to encourage innovation; if yours is to foster family togetherness, open floor house plans will suit you as well. When you include comfortable shared space in your dream house plans, you encourage mom, dad, and each kiddo to have positive family time.

3. Spend Less Green

With less money going toward labor, supplies, and framing (to build all those intervening walls) you might just spend less with open floor house plans.

4. Live Large: Make Your Home Seem More Spacious

With fewer walls, you’ll experience the appearance of more space, since people tend to judge spaciousness according to sight lines. As creatures that first became bipedal to see long distances across grasslands, we tend to feel more comfortable in more open spaces. Put simply, an open floor plan makes any home “live large.”

5. Flexible Design

With a few sturdy pieces of movable furniture, you can turn a great room into nearly any configuration you please. If an extra guest or two drops in for your elegant dinner party, you’ll have the space to accommodate them as long as you have extra chairs. Or, if you need to create a more intimate setting, you can block off a cozy area with Asian-inspired silk screens. Open floor house plans offers flexibility of use. It’s much easier to move a few pieces of furniture than it is to move a solid wall.

However, it does take a little effort to create the sensation of different “rooms” within a larger great room. Let’s say your “den” area feels a little too open and unprotected in the great room. You can add a couch to create the sensation of a wall, and back it with a bookcase for storage. Add a rug to give the eye an outline of the room, throw in a couple of artsy lamps, and voila – you’ll feel like you’re sitting in a distinct living room. To delineate each room, use rugs, lighting, furniture placement, and a distinct color scheme.

Open floor house plans are becoming more popular among home buyers these days. Here are 5 benefits of choosing open floor plans for your dream home.

Visit our website to read more about how to make your dream home a reality. HousePlans.com has a collection of over 600 house plans and designs for you to choose from, as well as home building services, such as custom home design, and resources for designing and building your home.

By: Rob Digby