Open Floor Plans

One of the most important decisions when building a new home is selecting the floor plan. The arrangement of rooms, the flow from one room to another and the use of space help determine the feel of your new home.

Legacy Homes realizes that floor plans play a huge role in determining your opinion of a home. That’s why we build a furnished model homes that home buyers can walk through, to better experience a new home before purchase.

However, like many buyers, you may be considering a floor plan that’s not available for tour as a model home or one that’s under construction. If this is the case, there are several simple tips that will have you reading a two-dimensional floor plan like a pro.

Calculating Sight Lines

As you shop for a new home, you may find two homes that have similar square footage — but one plan seems significantly larger than the other. How can that be?

The way the square footage is divided into rooms, not just the size of the home, and the way those rooms and spaces flow may be different. A key driver of all of this can often be sight lines.

In architectural vernacular, sight lines are what you see from any given point in the home, whether you’re standing in a doorway or sitting in a room. When sight lines are blocked by a wall or a closed door, a home can feel smaller. The reverse is also true: open things up a bit, show a hint of what lies beyond a given room, and a home will often look and live larger.

You can check a home’s sight lines easily with simple tools — a printed version of the floor plan, a ruler, and a pen. Start from the middle of a doorway. Draw a straight line to various focal points in the home. Do the sight lines you drew stop within that same room? Or do they extend through adjoining rooms or spaces?

Use this simple and effective technique to check sight lines from various places you’ll sit within the home. What will you see from the Café Area? The sofa in the Great Room?

This is why so many home buyers look for an open kitchen that faces a family room or great room, so someone preparing a meal can talk with others in the adjoining family room. A hot trend in home design is creating kitchens that provide front-row seats for family and friends to marvel at the skill of the chef. Legacy Homes has incorporated these designs into our floor plans!

Think About Traffic Patterns

The feel of a home isn’t based solely by what you can see from a given location in a home. In many ways, the true measure of a floor plan is the feeling you get as you move through the home.

Many builders these days have reduced or even eliminated hallways. It’s becoming rare to use a hallway to move from one space to another — they can be a waste of space. In many cases, rooms themselves have become our passageways. This has the added advantage of making smaller rooms seem larger when they open to other rooms with good sight lines.

The best floor plans use a technique called horizontal banding to accommodate traffic patterns. For example, if the great room is flanked on one side by a master bedroom and on the other side by the kitchen, the doors or openings should be kept to the same side of the home. If not, you create a traffic pattern that forces you to navigate diagonally through another room — in this case, the great room. It can also make furniture placement more difficult.

Legacy Homes open Great Room/Café/Kitchen concept in our homes helps you move from room to room smoothly throughout your home.

Balance Privacy and Togetherness

The relative placement of rooms can play a major role in how a home lives. Do you really want your children’s bedrooms directly above (or adjacent to) the master bedroom? We all love our children, but even the closest of families need their privacy.

Not all room adjacency issues deal with privacy. Sometimes it’s about togetherness. For example, kitchens should not isolate the person preparing the meal. Eat-in kitchens are great places to bring families and friends together. By combining food preparation and dining, you can create wonderful opportunities for conversation and closeness.
The game room concept is changing, too. Instead of just converting an extra bedroom, families are finding children’s retreats to be far more useful. A children’s retreat consists of a common recreation/study that serves as the hub of the children’s activities and is surrounded by their bedrooms. This area of the home becomes a special place just for the kids, where they can do their homework, play games or watch TV — while mom and dad enjoy some quiet time with a movie or reading by the family room fire.

Many of our Legacy Homes come with Bonus Room options! Some of these choices include: a Bonus Area with Storage, Bonus with a Bedroom and Bath, or Bonus with Bedroom and Bath and additional Storage!

Consider Window Placement

It doesn’t take a lot of windows to make an impact on the personality of a home. You just need to know where to put them. And, as you may have guessed, sight lines play a large role here, too. An expansive rear wall in the family room doesn’t have to be filled with two-story windows to bring in the beauty of the outdoors. Even a 20-foot vaulted ceiling doesn’t call for windows all the way to the top. Besides wasting a lot of energy, it may not improve the look and feel of the room. A strategically-placed set of six or eight-foot windows can have just as much impact and be far more economical.

All of these Tips are incorporated in our home designs at Legacy Homes! We offer EASYLIVING PLANS™ that are functional, spacious, and comfortable while maintaining a sense of beauty and craftsmanship. For more information, click here:https//www.legacyhomesal.com/easy-living/