ᐅ Floor Plan Design for Urban Villa – Catalog Floor Plan Inspiration

Hello dear members,

After a long time of quietly following the forum and officially reserving our preferred plot, we are now venturing into planning our urban villa. We have drawn inspiration from many catalog floor plans and sketched extensively on paper. The result is a design we are reasonably satisfied with. We would now like to have it reviewed by you to understand what works (or doesn’t).

First, the questionnaire:

Development plan / restrictions
Plot size 600 sqm (20x30 m) (6460 sq ft, 66x98 ft)
Slope no
Building area, building line and boundary 3 m (10 ft) setback
Number of parking spaces 2
Number of floors max. 2
Roof style any
Architectural style modern
Orientation garden facing southwest

Client requirements
Architectural style, roof type, building type urban villa with hipped roof
Basement, floors 2 floors without basement
Number of occupants, ages 3 (36, 35, 2)
Room area on ground and upper floors approx. 85 sqm (915 sq ft) each
Office: family use or home office? home office
Overnight guests per year 4
Open or closed architecture open
Open kitchen, kitchen island yes
Number of dining seats 6, extendable to 10
Balcony, roof terrace no
Garage, carport double garage

House design
Who designed it? do-it-yourself
What do you like most? Why? Our space requirements are met. Front entrance centered.
What do you dislike? Why? We are unsure if the upper floor works as planned. To make the fitness room functional in size, we had to move walls and reduce the upstairs hallway. Could this result in too little natural light on the upper floor? Also, we are uncertain if the utility room is adequately sized.
Preferred heating system: air-to-water heat pump + controlled mechanical ventilation

If you had to give up, which details/ additions would you omit
-could you give up: pantry, door from utility room to garage, straight staircase (even though we like it for being easy to use and providing storage underneath)
-could you not give up: fitness room, two children's bedrooms, office

Why is the design the way it is? For example,
What do you consider particularly good or bad about it? See above. We have included all the required rooms but are not sure the upper floor layout works. We also have concerns about storage space.

Regarding orientation, the plan is to position the house as close as possible to the street (northeast) to maximize garden space in the southwest.
Enough said: we look forward to feedback from the lions’ den. ;-)

9.33 m² (100.39 ft²) with two doors is already very tight for the utility room. Where do you plan to hang laundry?

I'm not a floor plan expert, but today I felt like taking a closer look:

In my opinion, the "landing" above the stairs, which resulted from extending the home gym, just doesn’t work. How do you expect to reach it to clean the windows or remove dust?

The door positions right next to the walls reduce usable wall space. Personally, I would place the doors at least 60cm (24 inches) away from the walls where there is enough room.

The utility room was just mentioned. There is probably not nearly enough wall space there for the heating system, washer/dryer, and all the necessary connections.

What is the exterior door in the bathroom for?

By the way, you should draw in furniture, so it’s easier to see whether something works or where there might be problems. Especially the kitchen looks difficult to furnish.

The pantry and kitchen layout doesn’t work. There is too little countertop and too little space to move around. The walk-in closet also cannot be furnished effectively and takes up a lot of space while offering little usable storage. The cloakroom is not functional either. You would have to step over all the clutter that tends to accumulate with children just to reach the guest toilet. And all of this in such a limited area...

In plain English: You have fitted more rooms into 180m² (1,937 sq ft) than what would be possible in 200m² (2,153 sq ft) :p
And it doesn’t feel open, as you wish either...

First of all, thank you very much for your feedback! 🙂

Alessandro schrieb:

9.33 sqm (100 sq ft) with two doors is really tight for a utility room.

That’s a good point. The problem is that we didn’t want to compromise either on the office/guest room or the living/dining area. Maybe it makes more sense to place the utility room on the east side and make it bigger, and remove the exterior door?

Musketier schrieb:

The "landing" above the stairs, which resulted from extending the fitness room, in my opinion does not work at all.

You’re probably right. We had considered allocating that area either to the fitness room or the bedroom, but then there would be no natural light in the hallway. It’s questionable whether that would be a big issue.

Musketier schrieb:

The door positions right next to the walls reduce the available space along the walls.

Thanks, we’ll take that into account.

Musketier schrieb:

What is the exterior door in the bathroom for?

That’s a copy-paste error from the ground floor plan. Of course, there will be a window instead. Overall, the window positions are not final yet. For now, we focused mainly on the interior layout.

Myrna_Loy schrieb:

The pantry and kitchen don’t work as shown. Not enough counter space and not enough room to move.

Thanks. Would it be better to combine the kitchen and pantry? Or halve the pantry? Alternatively, shift the pantry entrance to the right so that an L-shaped kitchen can be planned on the left? We actually wanted a separate cooking island. That’s probably going to be difficult...

Myrna_Loy schrieb:

The cloakroom doesn’t work either.

What exactly doesn’t work with the cloakroom? We planned to have a closet (100 x 60 cm (39 x 24 inches)) to store seasonal jackets.

Alessandro schrieb:

You managed to fit more rooms into 180 sqm (1937 sq ft) than possible in 200 sqm (2153 sq ft).

That’s a valid point. On the other hand, there are many floor plans with two kids’ rooms and an office in 160 sqm (1722 sq ft). So with 20 sqm (215 sq ft) more, a fitness room should be possible too...

We look forward to more ideas and suggestions for improvement.