The Green Room: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

In a stunning bit of hypocrisy, we’re busy making the floor plan of our house a bit more open in spite of our rants and raves about the practice. Allow me to explain.

Many years ago, when I installed our living room floor, I pulled up a baseboard and discovered that the wall between the living room and bedroom was of recent vintage. What we now use as a bedroom was originally a sitting room or dining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside.

I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation.

We have a kind of rule about home remodeling at our house: if it’s missing we replace it, if it’s broken we repair it. I like that our house is one of the few bungalows in our neighborhood that managed to escape the horrors of post-WWII remodeling trends. Restoring the original dining room and putting the closet back to the way it used to be will be the final major work we plan to do on this house.

Why bother with a meticulous early-20th century re-do when current design trends dictate that everything shalt look like Dwell Magazine? At the risk of sounding like Prince Charles, I’m just not a fan of post-1940s vernacular architecture. I like a house that looks like 1920 both on the outside and the inside. This puts me in cranky territory.

The professional gatekeepers of the architectural and design worlds would hold that you can’t go back to some golden era of the past. And yet, I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that something is wrong with the way things are. The problem reminds me of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “ratchet effect,” the idea that once you learn something (such as modernism and post-modernism) you can’t un-learn it. I don’t have an answer to this conundrum and I could also go on to site Jurgen Habermas haunting speech “An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age,” but that would delay all the work I’ve got to do over the coming month.

Clearly it’s time to put the philosophy books down and do some “deconstruction” with my new Harbor Freight reciprocating saw.