The open floor plan house concept has become popular over the years. Its association with modern/contemporary design has made open floor plan houses a common choice for homeowners.
What Is an Open Floor Plan House?
A house with an open floor plan removes walls separating some of the rooms. This combines two or more rooms.
The typical combination of this is with the living and dining rooms and can often include the kitchen in the open-plan arrangement.
However, the open-plan concept can extend to other rooms such as bedroom and bathroom as well as multiple bedrooms.
History of Open Floor Plan
When you think about it, open floor plans were probably around for centuries. Before industrialisation, small homes were typically single room open plan huts with cooking and sanitation occurring outside. Even caves where prehistoric people lived, could be considered as open-plan arrangements.
However, our current idea of open floor plan living was reintroduced and gained popularity in the mid to latter 1900s with architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pros Of Open Floor Plan
Here are a few pros of open floor plan arrangements that could improve your tropical home.
Cross-Ventilation
Cross ventilation in a home is most effective when there is an unobstructed path for air to flow from one end of the home to the other.
An open-plan arrangement will make it easier to have constant air movement through your home because of the lack of walls.
This will assist in passively cooling your home and provide better thermal comfort to you and your family.
Natural Light
Lack of walls may allow light to penetrate deeper into your home. Light entering your home through openings at various times of day can reach further.
This natural light will make your home feel larger and brighter. It also improves your mood.
Connection With The Outdoors
Incorporating nature into your home through biophilic design strategies are beneficial. We love to connect with our natural environment. This provides many psychological health benefits.
Open floor plan arrangements make it easier to connect more of your interior spaces with a view to or relationship with the outdoors.
A living room may have had a direct connection to an outdoor space like a patio, terrace, or veranda. However, the dining room or the kitchen may not. If these rooms are partitioned off, then they do not get to enjoy that connection.
With open plans, the connection to an outdoor space can be shared with the other adjoining rooms.
Small Rooms Feel Larger
Introducing an open floor plan design can also make a room feel larger.
When rooms are separated by walls, they can feel small and limiting. Having them open to each other gives a more open and larger sense of the space.
Hence, rooms can even be made slightly smaller and still feel larger and function just as well, because of the lack of separating walls.
Flexibility
There is also the potential for more flexibility to arrange furniture in an open plan arrangement.
Rooms can become smaller or bigger according to how they function. For example, the dining room may not be a space that is used very often in your home. The living room, however, may be the main space of your home which performs multiple task and functions.
Hence, you can increase the living room space and decrease the dining area.
Cons Of Open Floor Plan
They are some disadvantages to open floor plan arrangements.
Privacy
It can be a challenge to have adequate privacy in open-plan designs.
An activity happening in one of the spaces becomes part of the environment of the entire space. Cooking, studying, entertaining guests, and having a zoom meeting all in the same open area may become a bit chaotic.
Sound Transmission
By extension, having multiple tasks going on at the same time can start to get a bit noisy.
During the recent lockdowns, work and school from home became a common thing. Running a zoom meeting for work while the children are having their playtime becomes a bit harder to manage.
Mess And Clutter
It also forces us to be tidier. I am still trying to decide if that is a pro or a con. However, as a person who sometimes struggles to maintain a clutter-free kitchen, I’m going to consider it a con.
Because all rooms will be in clear view of each other it is important to have all of them cleaned and clutter-free when guests are coming over.
Conclusion
Open floor plan houses are a major part of our modern-day living.
Benefits to this include better cross-ventilation and natural light penetration. They also feel bigger, offer more flexibility and are easier to have a connection with the natural environment outside.
Some cons to this, however, are they can become noisy and hard to find privacy to perform various tasks.
I think open floor plan designs are still a great option for your home in the tropics.
Feature image by: Grant Pitcher (Instagram)