Before you start designing,
here’s how to actually
look at your floorplan
Light, movement, storage, privacy and daily habits: five lenses that reveal more than room labels ever will.
7 min readMost homeowners look at a floor plan and see rooms.
Living room. Kitchen. Bedroom. Bathroom. Study.
When we look at the same plan, we’re usually looking for something else.
Where does the light come from? How does someone enter the home? Where do they put their things?
Which walls are actually defining the space — and which ones may be preventing it from working better? Where are the structural elements? How do the kitchen and bathrooms relate to the rest of the home?
Are there awkward corners, oversized corridors or spaces that exist simply because that was how the original plan was drawn?
A floor plan tells us where everything currently is.
The more interesting question is:
Does it need
to stay that way?
Room labels are only
the first layer.
Follow the light
Follow
the light.
One of the first things worth looking at isn’t the rooms. It’s the windows.
Where does natural light enter? Which parts of the home are closest to it? And what happens between the window and the spaces further inside?
A floor plan may describe two rooms as similar in size, but they can feel completely different depending on their access to daylight.
A large room can still feel heavy if it is separated from the windows by too many walls. A smaller space can feel surprisingly generous when light is allowed to travel through it.
This can influence communal spaces, work areas, glass partitions, openings and even taller pieces of carpentry.
Sometimes improving a home isn’t about making a room bigger. It’s about allowing more of the home to benefit from what is already there.
How big is the room?
AskWhere does the light go?
Follow yourself through the home
Follow yourself
through the home.
A floor plan is static. You aren’t. And that difference matters.
Think about what actually happens when you come home. You open the door. Maybe you’re holding groceries or carrying a laptop bag. You remove your shoes, put your keys somewhere, charge your phone and move into the kitchen.
Later, perhaps you’re carrying laundry from one end of the home to another, or moving between your desk and the kitchen throughout the day.
These tiny movements happen hundreds of times.
01Arrival
- 01Arrival
Entrance → shoe / bag drop → Dining / Living
- 02Groceries
Entrance → Kitchen → fridge / food storage
- 03Cooking
Fridge → preparation → hob → sink → Dining
- 04Retreat
Living / Dining → central circulation → private rooms
- 05Guest
Entrance → Dining → Living
A floor plan is static.
You aren’t.
A small circulation review
- 01A door collides with another door.
- 02A dining chair sits directly in a walkway.
- 03A kitchen island leaves too little circulation.
- 04A guest route crosses a private area.
- 05A frequently used object lives far from where it is used.
- 06Oversized furniture creates a narrow route.
Your hobbies
are part of the
floorplan too.
Lifestyle isn’t limited to cooking, sleeping and watching television.
Maybe you work from home. Maybe you game. Paint. Build models. Collect figures. Exercise. Play an instrument. Do crafts. Read. Host friends regularly. Or need a quiet corner occasionally without dedicating an entire bedroom to it.
These activities change the way your home should flow.
Painting
daylight
work surface
washable area
storage
Gaming
power
ventilation
acoustic separation
screen positioning
Work from home
visual privacy
lighting
power
storage
background consideration
Before deciding what a room should be called,
understand what needs to happen inside it.
Storage should begin with what you already own
Storage should begin
with what you
already own.
One of the easiest approaches to storage is: “Let’s add more cabinets.”
But more storage isn’t automatically better storage. Before designing cabinetry, look at your current home.
What are you running out of space for? And just as importantly: what do you currently have far too much space for?
Not enough
- dry food
- pet supplies
- bags
- vacuum
- luggage
- documents
- daily-use objects
Too much
- deep kitchen cabinets
- unused shelves
- oversized wardrobe zones
- cabinetry for rarely used items
The problem may not be
too little storage.
It may be the wrong storage
in the wrong place.
Look for the things you stopped noticing
Your current home is one of the best sources of information when planning the next one.
Look around. What have you simply learned to tolerate?
An awkward corner where bags permanently accumulate? A cupboard you barely use because it’s too deep? A shelf that is technically storage but impossible to reach? A dining chair that has become the permanent home for clothes? A pet area that was never actually planned?
People are very good
at adapting to
inconvenient homes.
Good storage is about:
- What needs a home.
- How often you use it.
- Where that home should be.
Think about what should be seen
Think about what
should be seen.
Open-plan living has become desirable for good reason. More openness can improve light, visual connection and the sense of space.
But openness isn’t automatically better everywhere. A home still needs layers of privacy.
When someone opens the front door, what can they immediately see? Should someone sitting in the living room have direct sight into a private area? Does working from home require visual separation? Can a kitchen stay connected while containing smells and noise?
Where should connection happen —
and where should it stop?
Don’t move walls just because you can
Don’t move walls
just because you can.
When we see walls that may potentially be reconfigured, we naturally explore what else the layout could become.
Could one space be reorientated? Could circulation improve? Could a dark internal area gain better access to light? Could an underused room support two activities instead of one?
These are worthwhile questions. But finding a potentially removable wall doesn’t automatically mean removing it will create a better home.
As drawn
Questions worth testing
- better daylight?
- better circulation?
- more usable wall?
- improved storage?
- better privacy?
- less wasted space?
A different plan
isn’t automatically
a better plan.
A layout change becomes meaningful when it improves:
- Light
- Movement
- Function
- Storage
- Privacy
- Proportion
- Daily life
Five lenses · One plan
Five ways
to look at
the same floorplan.
01Light
- 01
Light
Where are the windows?
Where does daylight reach?
What stops it?
- 02
Movement
Trace your normal day through the home.
Where are you repeatedly walking?
What are you carrying?
Where could movement become awkward?
- 03
Storage
What do you actually own?
What are you struggling to store?
What storage do you barely use?
- 04
Privacy
What can be seen from the entrance?
Which activities need separation?
Which spaces should stay connected?
- 05
Daily life
Where do you work, cook, game, paint, exercise, host and relax?
What must your home support that is not shown on the original floor plan?
- —
Same plan.
Remove the tracing-paper layers. The rooms have not moved; only the questions have changed.
Same plan.
Different questions.
The room labels
are only
the beginning.
A bedroom doesn’t always need to remain a bedroom. A study doesn’t necessarily need four walls. A corridor doesn’t have to remain a corridor simply because it was drawn that way.
And an open-plan home isn’t automatically more successful than one with carefully considered separation.
The floorplan is the starting condition. Your lifestyle is what gives it direction.
A floorplan tells us
where the rooms are.
How you live tells us
whether they’re working.
That is why one of the first things we ask for is your floorplan.
Not because we’re immediately deciding where your sofa should go. We’re trying to understand what the space already gives us — and what it could potentially become.
Your turn
Start with the plan
you already have.
Send us your floorplan and tell us a little about how you currently live, what isn’t working and what you hope your next home could do better. We’ll start by looking at the space before deciding what the design should become.
Start with your floor plan ↗