If you put six house shells in a row, each with 3,000 square feet inside, you still will end up with six completely different homes. What causes this diversion? Space planning.
When the architect and the builder or homeowner get together, the needs of the people who will live in the prospective house will be determined and, hopefully, met.One family might need an extra room for romping children, while another would be looking to house a live-in maid. A family of five living within 3,000 square feet will design a different home from the empty nester family of two, given the same square footage.
Developing just the right floor plan can be quite a task unless you have a talent for or a background in architectural space planning. One way to go about it is to study floor plans of homes that already exist.
Many trade magazines have floor plans displayed within their pages. Find two or three that seem to fit your needs, then take the best of each and see if you can come up with just the right combination of rooms and sizes that suit your needs. With a floor plan in front of you, you can move walls to make some rooms bigger or smaller according to personal needs. Cut out rooms that are just right and try to arrange them into a good flowing order. Then take your masterpiece to an architect to make it all work.
Reading floor plans is easy once you get the hang of it. These are drawn from a bird's eye view, looking down into the rooms as though the roof were removed.
Floor plans are drawn to scale. What this means is that though what you see on paper is obviously much smaller than the actual house, the proportions will remain the same. Everything is reduced in size so that a fraction of an inch represents a foot of actual space in the physical structure. Most plans are drawn so that each quarter inch on paper represents one foot in reality. Magazine floor plans are drawn to scale, then shrunk further to fit the page. Unfortunately, once shrunk they do not have an exact scale you can measure, but they do give a proportioned overall picture of the plan of the house.
When planning your home, be sure your space requirements are met. Don't forget to allow for storage. Some of the square footage can be used to give character to a room such as vaulted or high ceilings. Skylights and clerestory windows serve to enhance the personality of a home, too.
Circulation, i.e. traffic flow, is an important factor to deal with. You don't want a living room that is so small you have to walk around the furniture to get to the next room. All rooms should be easy to get to. When one room will be used as the main activity hub, it should be planned so that the most direct route to and from it is across a corner or along one side in order not to interrupt activities in progress.
Besides the main traffic routes, each room will need its own little traffic path. Furniture placement will determine this path, so plan the furniture arrangement right from the beginning to avoid headaches and disappointments later.
For example, all rooms need windows, yet you would not want every wall in the room to be cut up by windows or doors or other breaking points so there would be little wall space for furniture placement.
If you intend to have a king-size bed in the bedroom, make sure there is an uninterrupted wall big enough to hold the headboard and two nightstands. Another solid wall will be needed across from the bed for a TV armoire or a dresser.
All this seems like a big task, and it is; but just relax and take it one step at a time. It is really an enjoyable task.
Rosemary Sadez Friedmann, a member of the American Society of Interior Designers, is president of Rosemary Sadez Friedmann Inc. in Naples, Fla.