Essay · 2 May 2026 · 9 min read
Against the open plan, thirty years too late
We removed the walls to make houses feel bigger. What we actually did was make every room the same room.
The open plan solved a real problem in small post-war houses: too many doors, too little light, rooms that could only do one thing. Removing the walls genuinely helped. Then it stopped being a solution and became a default, and we started doing it to houses that had no such problem.
A house with one large space has one acoustic, one temperature and one activity at a time. Somebody cooking makes the room a kitchen; somebody on a call makes it an office. The family disperses upstairs to find the privacy the ground floor no longer offers.
The best houses we sell tend to have between five and nine distinct ground-floor rooms with wide openings between them. Not corridors and boxes — connected rooms with thresholds. You can see through the house and still be alone in it.
Written by Tobias Renn · Acquisition
