Even the lovers of Versailles would say that the garden labyrinths aren’t meant to be slept in, and for some reason, it seems like some Florida architects or general contractors at some point decided to turn houses into this kind of intrinsic architecture.
Why is it that 1 of 2 houses that we visit as designers seem to have an endless number of wasted spots and more importantly, a completely non fluent design? The reasons can be many, and we’re not really interested in digging down the rabbit hole to find out who’s responsible for this situation, but we’re here to tell you that most of the time this can be fixed with a well thought out layout design.
As our usual way of explaining things, we’ll take one of our recent projects, an 1850 sq. Ft. home in Tampa Bay.
The owners recently acquired this home as their future dream house. It is a 3 bed 2 bath house, with an attached garage and… let us leave it at that, the rest is a messy combination of a tiny master bathroom that somehow found a nice spot for a bidet that never gets used.
The client was a former home flipper and she presented herself like someone who knew what she was doing but somehow couldn’t solve this space puzzle. When one area finally got fixed, the next one seemed to get worse, giving no actual solution to achieve this dream space.
I wish I could tell you how long it took to solve this problem and how much effort it was, but honestly I’d be lying. This is the truth: every single bad layout started somewhere, and every house seems to have a basic design aberration that spreads throughout the whole house like a disease. In this case it was the front door. Funny huh? What does this have to do with every mess inside? EVERYTHING. It started the experience in the wrong way and it made the main living room a giant foyer. Then it left very little space for the kitchen and so forth.
(Before & After. Notice in the before there are a lot of little walls creating tiny storage spaces. Useable space is ignored and the space available is poorly planned).
It takes an experienced eye to notice these design errors, but once cleaned up everything starts to heal, the house starts to flow, and new opportunities arise. In this case the project ended up with a very large kitchen, a comfortable living room with a fireplace, a master bedroom with a master closet, a large master bathroom and a bonus patio which brings light to all the spaces around it (it will also have special lighting design to be visible from different angles at night) and 2 decent size bedrooms.
It is worth reading the sentence sent from the client on our first email thread: “I can hardly describe the thrill of looking at the 3D! The layout around the front entry / office / living area feels sooo good.”
I’ll describe the feeling for you. It is called getting out of the labyrinth.
Once the client was on the other side, the creative one, all sorts of options and ideas came to life, and we finally had the flexibility to play with a well thought, healthy space. Of course our floor to ceiling windows facing the patio from the family room got cancelled to become a big laundry and guest bathroom, but hey, after all we are here to fulfill the client’s dream.
Check out the layout design, 3D diagrams and its evolution, and let me know what you think. But then look at your space. Living for too long in one of these labyrinths can make us feel like that’s the way our home should be. There’s a way out and it’s called Layout Design.