An article caught my eye over the holiday weekend. I see a lot of content like this, often in mainstream and influential magazines. This one, for example, suggests that for people with kids, a home with a giant open space at its center is the healthiest, most practical design choice. But I think the writer ignored a lot of economic reality—and research, that contradicts this hypothesis.
First, the article presents floor-plan decisions as a matter of taste. But for most people, taste is a luxury grounded in solid economic stability, not a guaranteed option. For the majority of buyers, design choices begin with affordability and trickle up from there.
Coldwell Banker’s 2025 American Dream Report, for example, finds 71% of aspiring homeowners are delaying marriage, children, career moves, or business plans until they can buy a home. Housing plays a big role in family decisions. Many say they are postponing having children because they can’t afford any home, let alone a spacious, open one.
The author contends that families like open plans because they can see through the entire space to watch kids playing, “creating a sense of calm for parents, and freedom for children.”
As a parent, this idea struck me sideways. I don’t know many parents that love watchdogging their kids constantly. And I’m not alone. Research from the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) has found that middle-class parents already live under what Ochs et al. call “intensive parenting” regimes—carefully choreographing supervision, schedules, and child-centered activities, often at high stress levels. They don’t want that heavy responsibility to continue all day, every day at home.
In other words, we need some partitioning in our homes, to give us a break. What other misconceptions do we have about open plan designs?
Device Addiction: Open plans ignore the wide-scale time suck of family members glued to their phones, tablets, and televisions. In fact CELF ethnography found that in open kitchens/family rooms, family members frequently engage in parallel, screen-based activities rather than constant conversation. They actually use screens as a way to escape from observation.
Clutter Creep: In addition, modern family homes tend to be extremely cluttered, with little “containment” for different tasks or hobbies. Toys spill into living areas, entertainment is constant and inescapable, and private space rare. An open plan makes it almost impossible to keep toys, mail, shoes, jackets and other clutter from spilling over into quiet, organized “safe spaces” for adults.
Rather than focus on what open plans are no longer the de facto floorplan for buyers, let me propose an alternative, a home designed for the times and budgets of most Americans.
1. It’s Smaller, Not Bigger
Most first-time buyers are not purchasing luxury window-wall homes. They are buying smaller, modest, financially constrained dwellings. First-time buyers today make up 21% of buyers, and they are older (median 40) and budget constrained (NAR 2025).
“Starter homes” have been shrinking across the U.S., and now average roughly 1,400–1,900 sq. ft. Financial precarity leads 71% of aspiring homeowners to delay major life milestones.
A real family-friendly plan optimizes compact square footage, rather than assuming unlimited space and budget, and offers:
2. It Includes Privacy as a Functional Resource
Privacy is not optional, it’s a necessary component of mental health, especially for certain family members such as teenagers. Instead of one open plan, here are some alternative space divisions:
3. It Adapts to Neurodiversity and Sensory Needs
An all-in-one space assumes all family members thrive amid noise, light, activity, conversation, and constant visibility. That is categorically untrue. The home needs:
4. It Recognizes That Kitchens Are Labor Sites, Not Showrooms
The open kitchen is often celebrated as an “interaction hub,” but ethnographic work shows it makes women’s labor more visible, not more shared. Families in the CELF studies show mothers performing 80–90% of food work, even in open layouts.
A realistic family-friendly kitchen:
5. It Has Space for Stuff—Lots of It
Magazine spreads depict surreal, uncluttered minimalism. Actual ethnography shows American family homes are bursting with objects, creating stress around cleaning, storage, and household logistics. Clutter correlates with higher cortisol levels, especially for mothers.
The realistic plan includes:
6. It Anticipates Change
Circumstances and families can change dramatically over a 15-year span. Houses must be able to reconfigure. For example, research shows that:
A well-designed home accommodates change, rather than trying to put every household need literally under one big umbrella.
The Bottom Line: Broken, Not Monolithic Space
Across cultural anthropology and residential research, the most functional floorplans are semi-connected spaces, not one giant room. Here’s why broken-plans work. They:
What might a truly modern plan look like? Probably a hybrid of old and new lifestyles: a mid-sized kitchen with an open dining nook, and a partially open family room, buffered by a half-wall or large doorway.
Rather than “boxing” up the space with a hallway and small rooms, the plan can incorporated modular aspects, such as sliding screens, pocket doors or glass partitions to modulate openness. A small interior “flex room” could connect to the living space, to serve alternately as a nursery, office, art studio or quiet space, depending on life stage.
No floorplan is perfect, but flexibility is key. If the various “zones” can morph into different uses over the years, a family can stay put, and stay sane, rather than wondering why they went with the open plan trend, rather than really thinking through how they live.
Publisher’s Note: Green Builder's 20th Anniversary celebration is sponsored by: Carrier, Trex, and Mohawk.