Our first region is the "public" region. Since we are designing a home in the community, it is worth pointing out that these are the "private public" regions of our home, not the shared community spaces. We will talk about those later.
We want the public region to be the heart of our home. This will be where we conduct many of our day-to-day activities and welcome and entertain our guests. These spaces include the entry way and areas for socializing, dining, cooking, and entertaining (i.e., media usage).
The entryway is the most public area of the home and the place where people enter and leave the building. It is rarely designed as its own room in contemporary homes. In fact, the area as a whole is often sorely neglected; in many homes it is little more than whatever space was leftover near the door with a closet thrown in for storage. However, the entry way is important both functionally and socially. It needs to pack a lot of functionality into a small space. It should connect well with the rest of the public area, both carefully revealing the home and welcoming visitors into it. We will likely have our entry open into the living area or some space between the kitchen and living area.
We want the social, dining, and cooking areas to be closely integrated, so we plan to have a fairly open plan that includes the kitchen, dining area, and living area. These areas will not have walls between them, but they will be differentiated by changes in flooring type or height, ceiling height, room shape, furniture clusters, and for the kitchen, the appliances and counters. We are inspired by the Farmhouse Kitchen pattern. This does not refer to the decor of the space but rather to the connection between the spaces.
The living area will be focused on socializing, not media usage, so there will be no display screen. The focal point will probably be a view through a window. The emphasis will be on interacting with other people — chit-chat, serious discussion, board games, etc. This area will hopefully be connected to a patio where we can move our socializing when the weather is nice.
The kitchen should accommodate the two of us cooking and baking together. It will have to handle prep, cooking, baking, clean-up, and serving — for simple dinners for the two of us; for nicer dinner parties; for our weekly potluck with friends; for parties where there is not much cooking or baking, but lots of food set out for snacking; and for special holiday gatherings with tons of food and people. It should be well-placed to serve both the dining area and living area.
The dining area should be able to hold a table big enough for a large group of people (at least a dozen), and it should be well-placed to serve or dish food from the kitchen. We do not feel the need for a formal dining room, and are happy to have it open to the kitchen and other areas.
We often entertain with the aid of digital media, but integrating a TV into a social area is difficult. Although these two activities are often combined in contemporary homes, they have different goals. For entertainment, you want everyone focused on a single point — the screen. For socializing, you want everyone focused on each other, which usually means some form of a circle or other convex shape. Additionally, when both activities might be happening at the same time, isolating the entertainment area (and its attendant noise) provides a benefit for everyone.
We plan to have a dedicated media room that can be better acoustically and visually controlled than a common room, and can have a more focused setup that helps optimize the number of people who can comfortably consume media together. This allows us to optimize the living area for socialization, in turn. Some ability to link the two would be nice — perhaps via french doors or a moveable wall, but that is still speculation at this point.
A guest room is a semi-public space. It does not quite belong in the private family spaces, but it should not be open to the rest of the public space. An office is also a semi-public space. It should allow isolation when needed, but we will often want to remain connected to the public areas of the home while we are using it. To address both these concerns, we plan to have an office that can be converted to a bedroom on the first floor. Having the guest room and a full bath on the first floor will also be useful as our relatives get older. It will give us the option of moving our own room downstairs as we age.
Finally, there must be some access for the stairs to the upper level. This will likely be towards the back, away from the entry and (at most) on the very edge of the public spaces. There is a balance needed here between being a dividing line to the private spaces that keeps away visitors, but also welcoming residents to the more private areas of the house.
Next we'll move on to the upper floor and private spaces.
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