An “Open Floor Plan” seems to be what everyone wants when buying a home.
Why were older homes designed with a “closed” floor plan where the interior of the house was divided up into several walled rooms?
Did families huddle together in one room and not have to heat the whole house during the winter?
That’s a lot of it. The other reasons are tradition and changing lifestyles.
“Everyone” definitely does not prefer an open floor plan. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I want rooms.
Ditto, I hate open floorplans.
yep.
and sometimes members of the family actually talked to each other, too.
Or they stayed in separate rooms so they wouldn’t have to. 
I love open-plan homes myself. But if I were a country housewife of a hundred years ago or so, I would have appreciated having separate rooms in case I was spinning yarn while my husband was grooming the dog and my children were shelling peas and braiding rugs. That, and we’d have a special salon for receiving important guests, which of course would but shut off from the rest of the house to keep it in tip-top condition.
Ditto ditto. Call me old-fashioned, but rooms are definitely an essential part of my architectural experience. I’ve been in loft-style apartments and I don’t understand how more than one person can live there without constantly being in each other’s hair. What about when you want private time? (Yes, for what you just thought of, but not only that.) What about when you want to have a private phone conversation or whatever?
Sometimes you just want to close the door. As Flanders and Swann sang, “Our boudoir on the open plan/Has been a huge success/Now everywhere’s so open/That there’s nowhere safe to dress.”
After a fire, friends rebuilt their house on an open plan. They hate it. If you are in the kitchen you are exposed to the TV in the living room, and vice versa. It looks good, and is airy, but is impractical.
Open plans can be aesthetically pleasing but they’re not always practical.
Someone reading or watching TV in a living room may not want to hear someone washing dishes or making dinner.
Open floor plan usually just means the living areas only, not the bedrooms.
Most people don’t like to be shut off from the rest of the action when they’re working int he kitchen. And when entertaining, it seems everyone always ends up in to the kitchen anyway, so you might as well make it more comfortable by making things more like one big room.
I like the open floor plan idea, and pretty much all the new designs I see being put out there these days are of that sort. Build a closed floor plan if you like, but you’re going to have a more difficult time selling your house.
Open floor plans are horrible to mu sense of aesthetics. I want a separate room for a kitchen, not a kitchen area that is essentially just the corner of a larger room.
Maybe with an expert interior designer such floor plans can be made bearable, but most of the ones l’ve seen that have been “amateurly” decorated are distressing and left me uneasy, much like I feel in houses where the drapes on street-facing windows are never drawn. No thank you!
Normally, there should be some architectural element to define the spaces. A cased opening or a kitchen island can easily serve that purpose without closing things off into a set of boxy rooms.
I think a lot might have to do with having the kitchen be separate from the living area. Until fairly recently kitchens were not lovely decorated spaces with shiny, matching appliances and walls of cabinets.
Back to the OP.
Some of it was probably a simple matter of load-bearing walls. Unless you had an expensive house, smaller rooms would be easier and cheaper to build for structural reasons.
Before central heating, fireplaces had to heat rooms. You needed small rooms to make that work. Castles needed fireplaces so big you could walk into them, but no ordinary family could handle that. Even later, the kitchen stove was an important means of providing heat. All those stories about families in blissful togetherness in the kitchen? Yeah, right. That was the only warm room in the house. You literally broke the ice on the surface of washbasins in bedrooms in the winter. Coal furnaces started central heating, but those were inefficient and ducting wasn’t as good as today.
Getting light and air to the far corners of a big room was difficult as well. Windows were smaller than today and light penetrates only so far. And in the evening, try lighting a big room with only candles. Gas jets needed to be placed in specific locations to work off the gas runs. Early electric lights were dim by modern standards and bulbs were expensive.
And rooms each had a purpose. Middle class families had a sitting room and a parlor and sewing room and a dining room and pantries and whatnot, all on the first floor. Each would be furnished differently and dedicated to its use.
Small rooms made huge amounts of sense until electricity, central heating, air conditioning, cheap lighting, picture windows, and proper ventilation allowed builders to use newer technologies to create open spaces. They came about because builders could do showy things with model homes that made them look terrific when people went looking. Living in them turned out to have drawbacks. I hate them, too. I’m sure somebody must like them but I’ve never met them. They’ll go away eventually, like all fads.
I think the cause and effect are reversed. Floor plans didn’t become open so people could display their lovely kitchens. They started decorating their kitchens after open floor plans put them on display.
This works great with the fantasy that one big happy family will be in the kitchen during meal prep and cleanup. In the real world, if someone wants to listen to the radio while cleaning up, and someone else wants to watch TV, it doesn’t work. Not great if you are a teenager either. I suspect that what would happen is that kids and parents will retreat to their rooms, and there will be less interaction.
Honest opinion? My kitchen is separate from my living room (at my last apartment, it wasn’t), and I like it that way, because (to be blunt) I don’t have to scrub both the kitchen and the living room from top to bottom should I ever wish to have friends over. Actually, the kitchen will probably be in a worse state than usual because I’ll just have been fixing food to entertain with! Who wants to clean that up before the friends get there, on top of cooking, cleaning the living room, and getting yourself ready?
Open floorplans is what houses used to have… when everybody lived in a single room. Not in 3000sq ft worth of room, but in a cabin-sized single room. Closed floorplans were the upgrade.
“Open floorplan” generally still leaves several separate spaces: bedrooms, bathroom. In a house with a truly-open floorplan, unless people are OK with sleeping in a room where someone else has lights on or is making noise, you’re going to have a big problem - of course, this problem did not exist when the house was all warmed up by a single fireplace or stove and candles were a luxury.
There are ways to make the kitchen and dining room one space while keeping them separate; I’ve seen many houses which have a closeable window between both. You want them separate (for example while cooking), close the window; you want them as one space (so people in both spaces can chat, or to pass plates), open it.
Spanish kitchens have always been decorated; actually, they’ve been decorated at the very least since the place was called Hispania. The Romans had their altars to the Lares in the kitchen, and I still know lots of people who have a statue of a saint or a recipient for holy water (usually empty, nowadays) in the kitchen.
Besides heating, I think hired is probably a factor. In the past, even middle class families would often have hired help. Having separate rooms would give the family some privacy while the domestic help worked.
Actually, I do think that kitchens probably opened up in order to display the consumer goods within. For example, in China it’s not unusual to keep the fridge in the living room in order to display your wealth. The next step is to open things up to display your dishwasher, etc.
Finally, our smaller family sizes probably contribute. A woman might cherish a few minutes away from the kids while she prepares dinner in a crowded hours. But a childless couple is not going to enjoy being apart from each other during their brief time they have together after work.
FWIW, I like open floor plans. I can spend hours cooking, and I don’t want that to condemn me to spend the evening in a room by myself.