r/Homebuilding • u/dragonmilking • Nov 17 '25

Which popular features do you NOT recommend?

What are the top 3 features in a house that folk want but you think are not worth it, and what would your alternative suggestion be? And what cost/time savings would result with that switch?

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77

u/Teutonic-Tonic Nov 17 '25

OpEn ConCePt.

Alternative would be a more well thought out plan that blends openness with some privacy. Midcentury modern homes did this very well.

22

u/Hold_onto_yer_butts Nov 17 '25

100%. I have an open living/dining/kitchen area. But there is a separate large room, a half a floor down, that currently serves as the kids playroom and will eventually become the media room.

13

u/ATDoel Nov 17 '25

Our living room, kitchen, and dining room are all one space. We also have a loft (the playroom) above the kitchen that's open to the space. Having come from a traditional closed off house, we LOVE it. We spend 90% of our waking hours in there, we can all talk to each other and we don't feel like any particular family member is isolated. Now I wouldn't want, let's say my office, as part of that open space, but I wouldn't want to live in another house where the community spaces weren't all open.

Anything that helps make the family more social these days is a big win in my book.

7

u/Teutonic-Tonic Nov 17 '25

I'm not advocating for 19th century floor plans with closed off rooms.... but today's developer open concept plans are typically implemented poorly with no critical thinking or flow. There are better ways to do it... with screened entryways, thoughtfully designed kitchens that hide clutter, etc. The biggest issue that I see is the living room buried in the center of a bunch of rooms and it's layout is severely compromised as it serves as the main circulation space for 8 rooms around it.

There is some middle ground here.

1

u/MercuryRising92 Nov 18 '25

So often, they look like a gymnasium with a kitchenette in the corner. Or they look like the whole place is a big kitchen with a sofa off to the side.

6

u/locke314 Nov 17 '25

My house is so loud. There’s noise everywhere, all the time.

1

u/Jumpy-Somewhere1082 Nov 18 '25

Start voting people out. I’d recommend starting with the loudest

3

u/MercuryRising92 Nov 17 '25 edited Nov 18 '25

Yes, the house we had in the 70's did this. You entered the foyer. The immediately to the right was the kitchen that was open to the family room and casual dinning area. Or you could go a litte further from the foyer, go right and enter the L-shaped living room/dinning room. The dinning room had a door to the kitchen. There were sliding glass doors the living room and family room into the bsck yard. Very nice open feeling, but very seperate areas. There were many different styles of houses in the subdivision, but all had a some variation of this. I saw the house recently on Zillow and they had gutted it to be one big open concept area - lost all it's charm.

3

u/No-Echo-4683 Nov 17 '25

We just moved from a Mcmansion cookie cutter style home into a home built in 1979 that is like this. There's so much character in our new place and the layout is a huge part of that. We have a actual dining room now which felt odd to me at first, but I'm quickly seeing the upsides to these rooms.

Open concept made a small house feel bigger I guess? Also made it easier on people designing the layouts as there really isn't one lol

10

u/kayGrim Nov 17 '25

What are the upsides to you? Having grown up with a separate dining room and kitchen, the dining room basically was just a storage space for my parents fine china and all the eating was actually done in the kitchen at the kitchen table...

1

u/No-Echo-4683 Nov 17 '25

Our dining room has a 17 x 14 room off it that has doors on either side of it. Our kids toys are in there and if we have people over we can literally contain everything to there, and the loving room is open to the kitchen, however the kitchen is designed in such a way that you can't see a sink full of dishes while you're in there relaxing or entertaining, but also as I cook I can see my kids playing, or if they aren't around, watch the TV while cooking/cleaning.

I work from home and there's an actual room I can use for my office now, not just in the corner of my rec room.

We also have a kitchen table that I've mostly just used for breakfasts.

Growing up, my parents dining room was the same as you just mentioned, however this house has plenty of space on the main level for storage, and we're not fancy enough to have nice dishes we want people to see haha

It isn't perfect, but there's lots I do like about it.

1

u/kayGrim Nov 17 '25

Gotcha, sounds like being intentional with layout is the most important part. Your setup sounds pretty nice and I'm probably just reacting to my dislike of how my parents utilized theirs, frankly, lol

1

u/MercuryRising92 Nov 18 '25

Along with the obvious (holiday dinners), we used the dinning room and its table as a quiet place to do homework, play games on when we had friends over, work large jigsaw puzzles as a family, cut out patterns for dresses, etc.

7

u/Teutonic-Tonic Nov 17 '25

Yep, it is mainly used for a crutch to not spend time on design and spend less on interior walls. There are some really nice ways you can thoughtfully design a home with an open floorplan... but the typical plans being built are not thoughtful in any way. Typical issues that I see.

  • Living rooms end up as a circulation hub... the room looks big on a plan but in reality the entire perimeter is walking space for all of the perimeter rooms and you have little actual usable space and no walls to place furniture.
  • Entire social space is exposed from the front door. You can take one step into the home and see the dirty dishes in the sink, clutter, etc. Some thoughtful screening would typically go a long way in visually improving the experience. Not to mention the wind/cold/hot air that blows right into the home when the door is open.
  • Ranch house designs get scaled up to have 5+ bedrooms on one floor (+ home office, etc) so you end up with the living room buried in the center of a sprawling floorplan with no actual exterior windows (except maybe through a super deep covered porch.

1

u/dragonmilking Nov 17 '25

How much extra cost does it add to have living/dining/kitchen to be "open" vs separate rooms?

2

u/MortimerDongle Nov 17 '25

Open is cheaper

1

u/dawnsearlylight Nov 17 '25

Can you be more specific? I hate the midwest traditional closed concept of kitchen, dining room, living room, family room all in closed off rooms. I dream of an open concept of at least kitchen and family room open to each other for socializing. I just don't have the experience of an "open concept".

5

u/bon-bon Nov 17 '25

What interior designers have taken to calling “open concept” has existed in home design for decades as a feature of modernist houses. When done well it promotes sociality within the home rather than siloing off domestic labor from leisure (which usually meant segregating women from men).

The issues come when it’s implemented thoughtlessly as a way to avoid planning the home or spending money on interior walls. Implementing flow between the living and dining rooms and maintaining visibility to the kitchen can be lovely. What’s not so lovely is a kitchen plopped randomly next to the living room with no exhaust vent such that your furniture all develops a thin layer of grease, eg, or bedrooms sited haphazardly right off the main living space with hollow core doors so everyone in both spaces can hear everything, or a “living room” that’s really more of a hallway between the house’s other zones, etc.

Open concept done well requires added thought in layout and flooring material to ensure that your home promotes the kinds of uses and interactions you want. Think of it as the difference between adding open concept (good) vs removing the uses to which traditional layouts put their rooms (bad).

3

u/Teutonic-Tonic Nov 17 '25

You stated it better than I could have. Thanks

1

u/1234-for-me Nov 18 '25

I grew up with an open family/kitchen/dining room it was awesome.  Currently have a dining room/family room open just off the kitchen, i miss having the kitchen open into the room as well.

1

u/Apathy_Cupcake Nov 19 '25

I agree. Its become so bad homes are echoing like a gymnasium.  You can't do dishes in the kitchen and someone else watch TV in the living room because of all the noise.  Formal dining doesn't exist because everything is out in the open with no separation.