Open Floor Plan Ideas – Open plan solutions are homes with few internal walls, more specifically with a great room that combines kitchen, living room and dining room in one large room. With the popularity of open-plan homes not waning anytime soon, if you’re looking to sell an open-plan home, you already have an advantage.
You want to show off your home in the best possible way because a vacant house, especially an open floor plan, can feel awkward and overwhelming to potential buyers. Fortunately, we’re going to share four easy ways to stage an open floor plan so potential buyers can envision entertaining, relaxing with the family, and enjoying the spaciousness of the space.
Open Floor Plan Ideas
While buyers like having an open floor plan because it allows for easier entertaining and easier supervision of young children, they still want defined spaces. Having one large room where the sitting area is not well defined or the dining room does not make sense for the design of the kitchen creates a chaotic, confusing feeling.
How To Decorate And Layout Furniture In A Small Open Concept Apartment
Create specific zones for dining, lounging and even an office or workspace if space allows, and use the furniture and accessories to create the defined spaces. Rugs and tables are an excellent way to define areas while still being attractive.
For example, create a sharp square or rectangle around a large rug for your seating area, turn the sofa so that its back faces the dining table, and rest a lovely console table behind the sofa. Not only will it create a subconscious “wall” effect, it will also hide the unattractive back of the sofa.
Open floor plans must be coherent, but that does not mean that everything must be done in exactly the same color scheme. Paint the large room a specific color, such as one of our favorite neutral paint colors, but use different colors as an accent for each room. For example, if you choose a cool gray wall color, use cherry red as an accent in the kitchen, yellow in the dining room and turquoise in the seating area to get your color!
While you want separation in your spaces, too much variety can make your home seem cohesive and sloppy. If you stage the seating area with a rustic farm design while the kitchen has an industrial, minimalist look, the home will not make sense. Keep a similar design theme throughout the room, whether it’s modern minimalist, contemporary or rustic. This can be seen in the lighting styles you choose, woods and accessories you use to stage an open plan.
What To Do With Blank Canvas Open Floor Plan Living Room?
When staging an open floor plan, you want to give a feeling of spaciousness, fluid energy and ease of movement. You’ll feel like every part of the room is part of a puzzle, and every piece fits together seamlessly to create a beautiful picture. The last piece of the puzzle uses the same floor throughout the room. This means choosing the best flooring for an open plan that includes being water resistant, durable and attractive. Porcelain or stone tiles or a high-quality laminate floor can be a great option, while rugs can be used to add softness. You don’t have to be an interior designer to create a beautiful open concept home. Although open plans can be more difficult at first, once you start implementing the tips in this post, you’ll gain confidence as your home design comes together.
While I’m keeping things simple by referring to your home, the tips work regardless of whether you’ve chosen a house, condo, apartment, or townhouse.
I suggest going through the Design Method worksheets and first thinking about your open space as a whole to come up with the overall color scheme and textures, then going back to break out the functional zones.
One of the most difficult decorating challenges in open concept decorating is creating a cohesive design through the connected spaces
Stunning Open Concept Living Room Ideas
All the photo examples are from our house, so I thought it might help to see the floor plan before we get to the first tip.
There is an unobstructed view from the front door right past the open dining room and kitchen into the living room, so I had to figure out how to make them work together.
Choose accent colors that can be repeated in different ways throughout your open layout. I chose Sherwin-Williams Web Gray and used it on the front door, kitchen island and on the back wall in the dining room.
While the color changes in different lighting, using the color in different ways helps to give all the open spaces some consistency while making them feel like unique rooms.
Open Floor Plans: The Strategy And Style Behind Open Concept Spaces
Whether your style is subtle or bold, patterns and textures add interest to your home and are an important part of your design.
With an open floor plan, you need to think about the entire space when choosing patterns for rugs, window treatments and pillows. They don’t have to be the same in every room, but you want to make sure everything is visible in the same view coordinates.
Our laundry room is connected to the garage entrance, which is open to our main hallway. That meant whatever we chose for the laundry room renovation needed to coordinate with the open spaces of the house.
Although I bought them all in different years, our new laundry room/entryway tile is a very similar pattern to the back door rug and our large dining room rug.
Modern Farmhouse Family Room Makeover + How To Design With An Open Floor Plan
Each instance of the pattern is slightly different, and you can never see more than two in one display, but the repetition still pulls the whole house together.
Now you might be thinking that I JUST showed you the laundry room/entryway tile to our garage that touches the wood floor, so I have to break my own rule.
The laundry room is actually an example of following this rule. Because we were updating the laundry room and it previously shared a tile with the entrance from the garage, we had to budget to update that floor at the same time. Keeping the old tile in an adjacent room would have felt choppy and overwhelming.
When making future plans for your home, think about how you can unite as many of the open spaces as possible with one floor surface. DO NOT be the open house I once attended where I counted 5 different floor surfaces in one viewing!
Open Floor Plan
We choose wood to run from the front door through the kitchen, dining room and nook. In retrospect, we wish we had found the money to continue it into my office, great room, and our downstairs bedroom as well.
All this said, DON’T be afraid to choose different tiles for different bathrooms. As long as they all go with your overall vision for your home, it’s totally fine to have fun with a variety of finishing options for each bathroom!
Open concept areas are not the place to be creative with lots of different wall and trim colours.
Keep the trim one color, and as much as you may be tempted, let the architecture of your house be your paint guide.
Open Floor Concept Design Benefits & Ideas
If you have one LONG wall that runs through several rooms, keep it one color.
I know your pain on this when you really only want to paint one of the areas. We have a wall in the kitchen that we can’t paint without covering the entire entryway AND the stairwell AND the room at the top of the stairs.
When choosing a paint for your large open space, be sure to test samples in each area as they will all have different lighting. Navigate towards a neutral color and add personality to your home in other ways.
It’s not all bad news, I promise! With most of the walls a neutral color, choose a fun accent color or wall treatment for a less defined wall like we did in the dining room.
Design Tips: How To Style Open Floor Plans
Rugs are my FAVORITE way to add style and define open spaces. If your dining area is completely open to the living room, ground each of them with a large rug.
We’ve talked a lot about ways to help rooms feel consistent and cohesive. It’s important to have that solid underlying palette, because then you can have fun mixing things up to match your personality.
Every space in your open space should have something to draw the eye to and help define it as an individual space in the memory of your guest. But it must also be special for you.
You probably already own some amazing things to present. Ours came together over time and is a mix of DIY projects (the G’s in the living room), art bought on vacation (Jackie in the dining room) and vintage finds (the auditorium desks in the entryway).
Translating ‘open Concept’ To Create An Inspiring ‘open Floor Plan’
If you’re stuck on this one, try brainstorming all the things you love. Whether it’s sports, travel, books, or a particular design style, I bet it will help you come up with some creative ideas!
Sometimes open floor plans can feel a little cold. Although less likely if you’ve implemented all the other tips, there are a few more things