Great Rooms too Great

Fad: The great room craze
The great Great-Room Craze of the 1980s was all about openness: Why should the kitchen be so removed from the other living spaces? Indeed, why should there be any distinction between one public room living, dining, den and so on) and another? Everyone should happily congregate in one free-flowing space. Sadly, the result is usually a great big mess. Think about it: The Echo Chamber You know what you get when cooking, video-game playing, conversation and television viewing occur in the same space? Noise. Lots of noise. Weird Windows All these windows and doorways are on the ground level and...also floating up on the second-story space, somehow reminiscent of a burned-out building. Also, how do you light such a space without it looking like a lobby in a Marriott?An Inconvenient Truth Boiling in the summer (all that glass!) and freezing in the winter (all those high ceilings!), giant rooms such as these are nearly impossible to heat and cool without spending some dough on an engineer - and you know that's not cheap.

Solution!!

How to Do It Right Instead of lumping public rooms into one vast open space, a better option is to properly arrange a group of normal size rooms (with normal-size ceilings). With the cunning use of french and sliding doors, rooms can be closed off when needed - say, when one person is watching TV and another is doing the family's taxes - and opened up when you want a more spacious feel. In the end you wind up with as much square footage as in a great room but with a more intimate, livable feel.The Payoff: Typical great-room construction: $150 to $350 a square foot Building a collection of normal rooms: $125 to $250 a square foot.Bigger is better? No, bigger is more expensive