The Wonderfulness Of Walls
People got so excited about "Open Concept" living -- living without walls, loft-style -- until they actually lived Open Concept, reports Beth Teitell in The Boston Globe:
When Brenda Didonna was house-hunting the last time around, she knew what she wanted: a home where the kitchen, living room, and dining room were one big, uninterrupted space."In our old house," said Didonna, a financial analyst, "I'd come home and make dinner and my husband would be watching TV in the other room, and a good portion of the evening we'd be apart."
She got her togetherness, all right, in a glorious new house in Millbury. Now when she cooks and her husband watches TV, he's in full view. Relaxing. While she works. "Frankly it's annoying," she said. A real estate agent has been called.
"I miss walls," she said.
If you're a person who lives with other people, there's no time that's alone time in an open-plan space -- unless you're sitting on the crapper (assuming you didn't Open-Concept the bathroom,too).
Even if you don't live with others, in Open Concept, there's no place to hide the clutter.
Personally, however, I think people just went a little overboard in opening up. I like an open kitchen and living room area -- it's just that I think the office and bedroom area are best walled off.
In general, though, in practice for people who live with other people, Open Concept living seems about as popular as Open-Plan offices. Or rather, the cacophonous, privacy-free hell that is an Open-Plan office. Teitell continues:
Scholarly studies on wall-free living, and what it means for family relations and TV consumption, are hard to find. But researchers have looked at what open space means in the workplace, and home buyers might want to take note."It's Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time," read the headline of a 2018 Inc.com story.
It reported on a Harvard study that found open offices kill teamwork, and the lack of privacy drove employees to wear headphones and correspond electronically rather than talking face to face.
I would guess that these Open-Plan offices also lead to otherwise non-violent people occasionally contemplating homicide -- of the loud talkers, loud chewers, and people who eat really stinky food at their desk. (Oh, and sorry -- those who fart all afternoon afterward.)
People: They're easier to like when they aren't all that close by all the time.
The worst is open floor plan bathrooms where there are no walls around the shower, so when you're done you have to mop and your towels and clothes are wet.
NicoleK at March 11, 2019 3:09 AM
Ugh...hate that in hotels!
Amy Alkon at March 11, 2019 5:32 AM
Shower curtains?
Why wasn't her husband sometimes making dinner? Or helping her? Or hanging out in the kitchen chatting with her about their respective days? Maybe, by choosing that separate downtime, they were indicating that was what they both needed.
Houses of old were built with servants in mind. No (or low) minimum wage meant that many middle class families could afford servants - if not live-in, then day servants. Who wants a kitchen open to the family room where one can hear the maid getting dinner ready while trying to socialize with the family or guests?
Personally, I like the family room and kitchen open to each other, but draw the line at the entire house looking like a loft. Give me some private spaces.
The open concept is fading in popularity as people get away from family dinners and family socializing, and the entire concept of the family fades from a social unit into a bunch of people biologically related to each other who live in the same house for a few years.
These days, Dad wants a "man cave" (ugh!) while Mom wants a "she-shed" (double ugh, Sheryl) and the kids are spending all their time in their rooms locked onto their cell phones anyway.
The people who advocate for the "open office" concept never have to work in one or are the boss in one.
The company I worked for in San Francisco converted to an open plan - trying to emulate the hip, cool dot-com companies then springing up like weeds throughout SoMa.
Older managers who'd had their own offices were dumped onto tables - four tables bolted together made a workspace and were divided from other workspaces by file cabinets. Many never adjusted and tried to replicate their old offices in their new spaces - with attendant crowding and clutter. Others never adjusted to not having private space and conducted their business as if their new space actually had walls (a la Les Nessman in WKRP).
Row upon row of workspaces with no break meant that people had to squeeze by each other to get out of the workspace and workers had zero privacy, perhaps by design. To get to Joe's desk, you could squeeze by Sally or walk 20 feet out of your way to the thru-way and come back. Guess which option most people chose.
Thin dividers delineated the four desks in a workspace and gave the occupants space on which to hang things - with the binder clip used to hang a calendar or cat picture imposing upon the space of the worker on the other side of the divider.
The acoustic ceiling tiles were removed to give the office that trendy warehouse look, with exposed vents and duct work. Nice, but those tiles absorb sound. The office rapidly degenerated into a '30s movie pressroom - random shouting, banging, typing, and bodily noises creating a cacophony of sound that made thinking all but impossible.
Conference rooms were few and far between, so meetings took place in "collaborative spaces" out in the open. Some of the managers who never adjusted had their team meetings right at their desks, conference calls and all.
Some managers, and employees, began preemptively booking conference rooms, so a conference room was never available this week. At any given time, we had dozens of conference rooms that were empty, but booked.
Did we collaborate more? Not really, but we did get to know far more about each other than we wanted to.
Conan the Grammarian at March 11, 2019 6:25 AM
I don't know about there being a connection between open offices and open homes. The office thing was just a sales job trying to put a positive spin on management being to cheap to pay for cubicle walls. Pro tip, if your management won't even pay for cube walls they probably aren't willing to pay for quite a few other standard things.
The open home is different. It is about feeling like you have more room and fighting off claustrophobia. Do some people take it too far, yes! You also have those idiots who make whole walls into windows and lots of other stupid house choices. But cost isn't really a factor.
A better comparison is the tiny house fad. Living in a shoe box suck. No matter how much you talk about the great lifestyle of living in an 18th century boat knockoff it sucks. People live in tiny houses because it is cheap not because it is good. Same with open offices.
Ben at March 11, 2019 6:29 AM
The open floor plan is just the culmination of domestic insanity that has gripped the west.
My grandparents had a 150 year old house. It was built room-by-room. At the start, there was just the kitchen and a living room. However, once they could do it, generations now six or seven removed from me built rooms that had character - the parlor, the drawing room, the smoking room, the sewing room.
If you walked into the smoking room at the front of the house, you'd expect to see an old man enjoying a cigar while looking out the giant front bay windows or watching a boxing match.
If you walked into the drawing room, you'd expect to see an old woman still painting into her eighties.
If you sat down in the parlor, it must be because the minister or the mayor had stopped in.
If you went into the sewing room, you could tell that was where a woman worked on making clothes.
If you went into the office above the garage, you could tell that was where a man ran a business, collected coins, and wrote little seditious notes on the wall about his hatred of Pres. Roosevelt.
People bow before their electronic masters that tell them what to think, when to sleep, when to wake up, and when to pee. The open plan home is a surrender on the idea that you can have any purpose anywhere - make it a giant hut, centered around some electronic master or another, and mindlessly follow its direction.
El Verde Loco at March 11, 2019 7:48 AM
This will run its course, too. Every design fad does. Once every home in the country is "open concept", designers will go for the "retro" look of walls and specific purpose rooms. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Designs just run in endless loops of what's in, what's out, what's retro. In 20 years, avocado appliances and shag carpet will be all the rage again, and hardwoods and stainless appliances will be "so 2019!". Kitchen islands? What, you want to be like Grandma?
Jim Armstrong at March 11, 2019 8:15 AM
Open floorplan offices are popular because they are cheap to set-up. That is all.
There has never been evidence that they benefit collaboration or communications. That was just an assumption and a justification.
It also prevented people from complaining - you aren't against collaborating and communicating are you??
mormon at March 11, 2019 8:51 AM
You only need so much collaboration. Most actual work requires concentration and focus, which are destroyed by noise and interruptions. Even "creative" work requires focus. If all you do is collaborate and have meetings you aren't doing any real work. I was in an "open" office for 7 grad students in grad school. Every time someone came in they had to chat a minute--it is an almost irresistible impulse.
Cubes aren't much better--you can still hear people on the phone. The only excuse is that they are cheaper than offices for everyone.
A common floor plan in newer homes around here is an open family room-kitchen combo, with a vaulted ceiling for the family room and an opening with railing onto the 2nd floor bedroom area above. This makes any noise from watching TV go straight up to the bedrooms. Dumb.
cc at March 11, 2019 9:08 AM
If your employees are you highest cost, it is foolish to do anything that cuts their productivity. But CEO after CEO cuts cost because some bean counter* tells him to. There are too many Harvard MBAs who can count pennies but do not have a clue about value. Make the buildings cheap, get rid of employees and outsource to China. What could possibly go wrong?
*I have worked with good accountants but they are a dying breed. Too many are useless for anything but counting beans.
Curtis at March 11, 2019 9:32 AM
The combined kitchen-dining-livingroom is a requirement for me. More efficient use of space in a small house (and avoids the kitchen feeling cramped). Also I know a lot of parents who like having a line of sight on their kids when parents are cooking and kids are in the living area.
However a past owner of our house also “opened up” the bonus room, which serves as my office (and closet). We are making do with a curtain to close it off for now, but it’s super awkward whenever I try to work from home and we have an overnight guest staying with us. I am bothered whenever they are in the kitchen or living room watching Tv and they feel like they have to tiptoe around.
My husband wants to “open up” the kitchen even more by melding it with our entry hallway. I don’t want to lose the cabinets and, call me old fashioned, but I like having a nice partitioned “entryway” with a coat rack, key hook, a place for muddy shoes and umbrellas, and photos on the walls.
sofar at March 11, 2019 9:33 AM
What, you want to be like Grandma?
Jim Armstrong at March 11, 2019 8:15 AM
_____________________________________________
Well, MY four grandparents generally had good taste. Even any Victorian furnishings they got from their parents and grandparents didn't look outdated. Just classic and old-fashioned.
(The next generation was a different matter altogether, but thankfully, none of them, to my knowledge, ever used anything avocado or in shag. Also, most of them had the sense to recognize fads when they saw them and NOT spend money on them.)
My paternal grandfather had a house that had few walls, but even when there were six or more of us there (rarely), we managed to get along. (There were two private bedrooms - plus a tiny poker room. The kitchen had a counter, IIRC, that worked as a partial wall.)
lenona at March 11, 2019 10:26 AM
"generations now six or seven removed from me built rooms that had character"
You may sit here in the waiting room or you may wait here in the sitting room.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 11, 2019 11:04 AM
Good xxx are always a dying breed Curtis. And yep on the Harvard stuff. Once those guys show up you know it is time to start looking for a change of scenery.
Ben at March 11, 2019 11:07 AM
"You may sit here in the waiting room or you may wait here in the sitting room."
Nick Danger, Third Eye!
Jim Armstrong at March 11, 2019 11:35 AM
Architecture and interior design fads are certainly nothing new. I feel like this decade has had more than its share, though.
I've been told by several parents that the driving factor behind "open concept" is the post-modern necessity for parents to maintain a sight line to their children every minute of the day. Mustn't allow the little darlings out of your sight for even a moment, or else CPS might be knocking on your door! A lot of them don't actually like it that much, but they feel trapped by the expectation. And the fact that a lot of them over-spent for a trendy house, and now they're house-poor, if not upside down on their mortgage.
I have a relative who built a house, circa 1980, where the entire house was one gigantic open space except for the bedrooms, baths and garage. We called it the "party house" because that was all it was good for. It was impossible for a family with teenage children to live in -- the person watching TV bothered the person listening to music, who bothered the person trying to have a phone conversation, who bothered the person trying to study, and they were all bothered by cooking and kitchen and laundry noises.
When my wife and I were designing our current (and hopefully forever) house, I told her that I never again wanted to have to listen to a dishwasher while I was watching TV. Our old house, although it wasn't open concept per se, had the kitchen and den positioned such that the dishwasher was only 15 feet from the den couch. And back then, dishwashers were a lot noisier than they are now. We designed a house that is nicely partitioned without being a rat's nest of hallways (something that did happen in some mid-century designs). Guests come over and they marvel at how open our house seems even after we point out to them that it isn't open-concept. And it actually works well for entertaining; groups can break off and go into different parts of the house to have different conversations, and it doesn't all dissolve into a din and you don't have to shout to be heard.
"It was built room-by-room."
As late as the 1980s, around here, when your family grew, you didn't usually move -- you added on. I think there are a couple of reasons that that stopped. First of all, some of the homeowner-built additions were substandard, and eventually it gave all add-ons a bad reputation. (If you watch a bunch of the home reno shows, you'll notice that whenever they redo a home with an addition, they will generally remove the addition regardless of what shape it is in, because older additions decrease the resale value.) The other thing is that while houses have gotten bigger, lots have gotten smaller while city-required setbacks and easements have grown. Now, it's not uncommon to find that a newer house already occupies the entire available building footprint on its lot. You can't even add a patio without a zoning variance, which cities are becoming increasingly reluctant to grant.
Cousin Dave at March 11, 2019 11:37 AM
Everyone on HGTV seems to parrot a desire for this "open concept". I get that they can't seem to grasp what a designer can do for them; I'm sure there are more capable people like Jo Gaines or Hilary Farr.
No one seems to have noted the utility of the big-screen TV adding "window space" to lower floors or basements via camera attachment. Some are very good at this. You need to watch your kids all the time? Cameras.
The biggest handicap I see on the typical HGTV show is the present homeowner's crap everywhere, especially toys. If they just carried everything into the driveway, repainted, then reloaded the house they'd be better off.
Radwaste at March 12, 2019 1:40 PM
This is what "good fences make good neighbors" always really meant.
I have always believed that open-plan and cubicle-farm offices were invented by a nasty boss as the next best thing to a Panopticon.
jdgalt at March 14, 2019 5:20 PM
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