The high level zones of our home were largely determined by our desire to have common areas at the heart. The intimacy gradient and treatment of natural light as well as the general constraints of the site helped determine the more detailed layout.
But the success of a layout turns on how rooms are connected to each other. Today’s post will explore how we approached movement through our home.
The Flow Through Rooms (131)
- Problem: The movement between rooms is as important as the rooms themselves; and its arrangement has as much effect on social interaction in the rooms, as the interiors of the rooms.
- Therefore: As far as possible, avoid the use of corridors and passages. Instead, use public rooms and common rooms as rooms for movement and for gathering. To do this, place the common rooms to form a chain, or loop, so that it becomes possible to walk from room to room — and so that private rooms open directly off these public rooms. In every case, give this indoor circulation from room to room a feeling of great generosity, passing in a wide and ample loop around the house, with view of fires and great windows.
- In our home: The purpose of this pattern is to enhance social interaction. As the pattern describes it,
The possibility of small momentary conversations, gestures, kindnesses, explanations which clear up misunderstandings, jokes and stories is the lifeblood of a human group. If it gets prevented, the group will fall apart as people’s individual relationships go gradually downhill.
To encourage this sort of casual bonding, circulation areas should be used to help connect people to each other in the public parts of the home. Even private areas should not be fully separate from the flow of people.
In our home, the main public areas are on the main floor. Although the bedrooms upstairs and the media room downstairs are fairly isolated from the main floor, both floors are situated to encourage passing through the main floor. The floors are connected by a single open staircase, so moving from one region to another provides social connection.
The image below highlights the circulation pathways on the main floor. They are adjacent to living areas without going through those areas. One particularly interesting — and unintentional — detail is the relationship of the main entry to the stairs. People cannot go from the main entry to the private bedrooms upstairs without making some contact with the common area, but the pathways are generous and tangent enough that that interaction can be as brief or lingering as desired.
Short Passages (132)
- Problem: “… long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture.”
- Therefore: Keep passages short. Make them as much like rooms as possible with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. Make them generous in shape, and always give them plenty of light; the best corridors and passages of all are those which have windows along an entire wall.
- In our home: We only have passages in two places: the stairway itself and the upstairs landing. The stairway is fairly long, but the u-shaped path and the open design make the space feel more compact. It has some of the best windows in the house, and we intend to add window seats on the landings.The upstairs landing has more difficulties. To its benefit, it shares the windows from the stairs, is fairly short and generously sized. To its detriment, it has an opening on each of the four sides, making it harder to treat as a room. We should be able to fit some furnishings in the southwest corner of the landing, but that will be made somewhat harder because the door to the south bedrooms is a sliding door mounted on the wall.
In both of these cases, we have passages with potential, but they’ll require care to really become spaces that contribute to the feel of our home rather than detracting from it.
