This was just a way for home builders to save money by building fewer walls.
They convinced homebuyers and influencers that is trendy, that living in a house that feels like a Walmart supercenter was the thing to do.
I really don’t think many homebuyers asked for a toilet next to their living room.
Nah, adding an interior wall during construction is cheap. They build open floorplans because that’s what people want. I’ve been on dozens of custom house builds and ALL of them had open floorplans. Whether or not they’re good is up for debate, though!
I see the appeal of both but lean anti-open floorplan. Like I want walls in a kitchen but prefer when it opens up to the living room or dining room. I currently have an “enclosed” kitchen and I don’t like that it feels separate
Open floor plans are often more expensive, because you can’t use interior walls to carry the load of upper floors/roofs.
Unless you’re talking about a really big span – and usually we’re not, since even open floor plan houses tend to be long in only one direction – it’s not that big a difference. A little bit of extra wood for beams and columns is cheap compared to the overall cost of the building.
Retrofitting an open floor plan on a building that wasn’t initially designed that way is expensive, of course, but that’s a different thing.
Fair enough. I do see people install TVs above their fireplace of their own free will. They just see other people doing it and think “that’s what I want!”
That’s an especially funny truth to me because I did home AV and saw it all the time.
To me, the only “acceptable” way to do it is with a Samsung Frame that stays on Art Mode 99% of the time.
Some interior walls might actually make it cheaper to build. All that structure is still there in the open plan, the big beams are just hidden.
Yeah true, beams get REALLY expensive
Most houses are narrow enough the modern trusses can span the whole width and there are no big beams. If you are in the exception (more likely they didn’t use trusses than you live in a mansion too wide) then a beam/wall is needed, but that isn’t the common case for modern construction.
I guess I’m stuck in the old house/renovation train of thought.