I look at the designs for today's open concept plans and they look to me like pioneer days where there was one big room for eating/reading/relaxing/cooking. Then there was a loft area in which to sleep. Somehow, I don't think this is progress!

I never wanted my children and their toys in my LR - it was an adult room. I liked all that mess in a play room, preferably either in the basement or on a 3rd floor if there was one. I want my bedrooms all on one floor as I always wanted to know if my children were up or asleep. I don't want cooking odors in my living area, which one has if the kitchen is open. I like a lot of cabinets (good storage), and lots of counter space. One loses that with open concept. When I entertain, I don't want to sit and look at the kitchen and the pots and pans on the stove or in the sink.

I can certainly see why builders of tract houses love these - fewer rooms/walls to build and more profit. They have convinced women that they are in the kitchen, all alone for hours each day. Highly unlikely - most working women spend a minimum amount of time in the kitchen preparing a meal if they do so at all.

I learned several years ago on another forum, that today, many, many people buy/build things for their "fantasy life", not their real life. What a shame.

Having grown up in a totally compartmentalized house, I much, much, much prefer an open floorplan as long as bedrooms are closed off.

I think you can have open concept and then still have a lot of things that Virgil mentioned. I know we aren’t building our fantasy life home but our perfect for our life home. We have an open concept great room, dining room, kitchen. But we also have a basement with rec room same size as the great room. All bedrooms are upstairs on one level. We have a guest room as well as an office. I suspect the main floor will be where we spend the bulk of our time but I also know the kids will be downstairs often, we will use the office etc. We love entertaining and I love when the kitchen is accessible so the person who does the cooking, hubby or I we take turns, gets to still be involved. For our real life as a family I think our open concept house will live very well!

We purposely built our new home to be closed concept. I am noise-sensitive, and while we don't have kids, we like each room to have a purpose, and to be able to separate the sounds/visuals/etc of those purposes. We love it.

We had an open concept kitchen and dining room in our last house because I thought it would be convinient to keep an eye on my young children. While expecting our third, we moved to a bigger house and the last thing I wanted was a kitchen that was opened to other rooms. We bought a 100 year old house and kept the kitchen walls intact while remodeling.

To me, the noise was the biggest issue. Kids make so much noise and so does someone in the kitchen. It went both ways.

Visual clutter was the other main issue.

So even with 3 young children (the oldest is 6) I prefer a closed kitchen and I'm glad to see that I am not the only one.

People always say we don't use and need dining rooms anymore. But when your only eating option is the dining room, you use it everyday and every meal feels special!

I also vote for more privacy and noise control. I want to watch an old movie while golf is on tv in the other room. I don’t like looking at dirty dishes while we are having dinner. I sometimes need to contain cooking smells to one room, not the entire house (love fried oysters). Small children grow up and the noise is even louder when they are teens. ( it happens overnight. Ask me how I know!). But one of the more difficult aspects of open concept is decor. Where are corners and walls for furniture arrangement and pictures? If someone walks in the front door unexpectedly (teenage friends), are you dressed in pjs? We added a wall to our entry space when the teenage friends started driving and dropping in. Is the whole space clean and tidy if your neighbor pops in or the minister appears?

In our new house, we wanted open concept but also wanted some individuation, so we have the kitchen with the dining room off it, surrounded on three walls by windows and also bordered by base cabinets for lots of storage, and then around the corner, though still open, is the living room. So there are three individual areas vs. the more common long rectangle with kitchen>dining area>living room. One end of the island is fairly close to the dining area, so it's handy as a serving area for meals, and it works especially well for parties and extended family gatherings. Ms. Wagner may entertain only a handful of times during the year, but we are close to 10 people here fairly regularly, just with my three kids' friends and girlfriends over for meals.

I grew up in a smaller NYC apartment with a closed-off, eat-in kitchen with room for my mother and grandmother and no-one else during mealtime preparations or clean-up, and I would never want to have that arrangement again, even if the kitchen were a good size. It was a very different life and a very different lifestyle from what I have now on a farm in western Canada with three young adults, two of whom will be living at home for the foreseeable future, and I too am reminded of Magnaverde's dictum from the Home Decorating forum that one should design for the real life you live : ) .

Many of the most interesting and inviting homes may be those which possess interior spatial variety, i.e., the sense of going and coming from somewhere to a different where with a pleasant and stimulating sense of both travel and arrival.

If everything is the same--everywhere--what's the point?

That applies to all 8-foot high small separate rooms as much as it does to a single large vaulted ceiling within which all of life's functions are located.

We no longer live in a single room log cabin with a fireplace and four windows. The marauders no longer threaten our outdoor and indoor existence.

So we have choices about how we will live.

I like to think it's not an either-or choice: all private rooms or all open space.

I prefer interior spatial variety created to host the way we live and use various interior spaces.

Just my mileage.

There's a longstanding thread elsewhere in Houzz on the subject of hating open concept homes, and it strikes me that both that thread and the article cited here make unwarranted claims about what open concept must entail. I have had two open concept homes, in that kitchen, living and dining areas were all open to each other. In neither house did the front door open directly onto the public areas, neither had a "sprawling" kitchen, and neither lacked soft furnishings on floors or walls. So some of the complaints about open concept homes simply don't apply to the ones I've lived in or looked at.

My new house has public spaces that are large, open and high ceiling'd. The private spaces are smaller, cozier and have 8.5' ceilings. I asked for this from my architect. I think he delivered. And yes - there's a lot of open space - but when it's just me and hubby - I feel like we'll "use" and appreciate more of the house as we move about a larger open area, vs separate rooms.

Both open space and more compartmentalized spaces can be well done (or poorly done). And a home should reflect how you live.

Eh, I like open floor plans ... as long as the house also includes a get-away space that allows for privacy too.

I also like semi-open. For example, I like the kitchen -dining combined together, while the living room is separate.

I can see both sides of the coin. Our last home we just sold had large individualized rooms. I agree it was nice having the living area separate for noise purposes but I was always alone cooking and cleaning up while everyone else was in the family room that was two rooms away. I have an open concept in Florida and we love it. Like jmm1837 it is only the two of us with very little company except kids and grandchildren but when they do visit I always can see them and talk while I am cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, etc. I do not find it a hindrance or bother. Also I am OCD and always do the dishes up right after dinner.

We are now building a one level with open floor concept. I can see why people with children (and the messes) do not like it. To each his own!

I lean toward a more closed concept.

When you walk in my front door, you can see my refrigerator, but not the rest of the kitchen. I really regret that it worked out that way, but at least the rest of the kitchen is out of site. I wanted the kitchen to be private from the front of the house, so when one turned the corner and walked in, they get a little surprise because my kitchen is the most "stylish" room in my house.

When you walk in my front door, you can see a sliver of the kitchen island beyond the front hall, and a wee bit of the round sitting area off the living area, and you can't see the dining room at all. From the back door by the kitchen, which is by the walk-in pantry, you can see just the side of the wall oven straight ahead.

My favorite ways of marrying open and closed is by using cutouts in walls, with ways of closing them off, like interior shutters (be still my heart!!!), swinging doors that can be propped open (like in kitchen/pantry/laundry), and french doors (maybe even french pocket doors) between rooms.

I'm hoping to sell my husband on a few of these ideas, since he's an open-concept guy, and I'm a more-individual-rooms girl.

I have zero interest in cooking pancakes in my livingroom or living in a hockey rink. I'm firmly in the "have separate spaces and environments" camp.

I currently have a best of both worlds flexible open concept layout, in my 1982 contemporary. It has large wooden accordion doors that can close off the living/dining great room, from the front hall and/or the kitchen. I really enjoy having the option of open or separate spaces. Very nice when I want to talk to a surprise visitor at the front door and hide my living room if it’s not quite tidy enough for show. Or I want to do the after dinner kitchen cleanup while listening to my own music, and not be bothered by what the family is watching on TV in the great room. Also came in handy when I wanted to contain my young puppy out of certain areas.

Reminds me of a modern take on my sister’s 1920s foursquare, which has original pocket doors to open up or privatize living spaces.

We have open concept and love it. It works for how we live. Most of the time it's just me and DH. Our kids are in college. Even when the kids are home the house works great. We are not formal people. We had a separate formal dining room in our old house and hardly ever used it. Now we have the dining area open to kitchen which serves as our daily eating area and is also large enough if we have family over for the holidays.

The house we have rented the past 20 summers has a semi-open floorpan. It's a very old house and was a small workman's cottage (year 'round!). The present owners bought it about 40 years ago, and opened up the rabbit warren of small rooms on the first floor. There are supporting beams in multiple places, but they have built around them with book cases. The dining room is open to the LR but is clearly a separate area. But they left the kitchen separate and I like that very much. It has a table and chairs in it and was a perfect place for the high chair and to feed the grands when they were young. I love being able to sit at that table and do prep work. But I also love that it is separate from the rest of the 1st floor. They did it brilliantly.

We rented a house, once, with a closed off kitchen and it was depressing. It was laid out in a way that didn't allow for people to "hang out" with the cook while they were working. I see cooking as social, so our kitchen, dining and living room are all open to each other, but generously enough sized that they feel like their own space. We do have a foyer, which I love. I hate being dumped into a living room without any sense of entry.

I like individual rooms. I like open spaces.

What have I missed so far?

I'm not a "social" cook. People in my kitchen are in my way and a distraction. I end up forgetting if I put in something or not. When I entertain, I plan my menu so that I do much of the prep ahead of time, minimizing time in the kitchen alone. I prefer my guests to do their socializing in my living room which is a beautiful room, designed for just that purpose. And after dinner, I want them to retire from the DR and go back into that LR.

The way I look at open vs closed plans is basically this: a larger home can accommodate a closed plan much better than a small home. Most (note I said “most!”) people do not enjoy spending time in cramped, enclosed spaces. Tiny foyers and hallways, small kitchens with one access and no sight lines, and entertaining spaces that impede flow do not work very well with today’s lifestyle. When square footage is limited, a more open plan allows light to flow between areas and seeing more of the home alleviates that “hemmed in” feeling. In a larger house, even with a closed plan, each room has more square footage, more wall space, so more windows...basically more room to breathe.

I don’t know if the supposed trend toward smaller homes is actually happening in real life, but if it is....open plans aren’t going anywhere. Bigger homes will have a mixture, but smaller homes will have mostly open spaces. That’s my prediction and I’m sticking to it! :)