ᐅ Planning a Single-Family Home: 550 sqm Plot, L-Shaped Layout, South-Facing, Gable Roof

Hi,

let’s start directly with the questionnaire.

Development Plan/Restrictions
Plot size: approx. 550sqm (5909 sqft)
Slope: no (approx. 0.5m (20 inches) height difference over 22m (72 feet) plot width)
Floor area ratio: 0.4
Plot ratio: n.a.
Building envelope, building line and boundary: 16m (52 feet) west-east + 3m (10 feet) border construction each side, 14m (46 feet) north-south, 5m (16 feet) setback from the house to the street
Edge development: yes (north: public access road, west and south: bike path, east: neighboring development with a semi-detached house, currently vacant)
Number of parking spaces: 2
Number of floors: 2
Roof pitch: 0-35°
Style: standard
Orientation: south-facing (garden)
Maximum heights/limits: eaves height 5.5-7m (18-23 feet), building height 10m (33 feet)
Additional requirements: none

Client Requirements
Style, roof type, building type: preferably gable roof
Basement, floors: no basement, 2 full floors + expandable attic
Number of occupants, ages: 4 for the main apartment (2x41, 9, 7)
Room requirements on ground and upper floors:
Ground floor: living-dining area, open kitchen, office/guest room, guest WC, utility/technical room
Upper floor: 2 children’s rooms each at least 15sqm (161 sqft) facing south, bedroom with window facing west, bathroom, second shower bathroom
Attic: multi-purpose room (hobby) + storage space due to missing basement
Office: family use or home office? Home office
Guests per year: occasional
Open or closed architecture: rather open (open galleries not included)
Traditional or modern construction: ...
Open kitchen, kitchen island: both yes
Number of dining seats: 6
Fireplace: no
Music/stereo wall: no
Balcony, roof terrace: no
Garage, carport: yes, but not yet decided which; placement on east side
Vegetable garden, greenhouse: no
Other wishes/special features/daily routine, including reasons why certain things are or are not wanted

• Backup kitchen was originally planned but removed due to space constraints
• Utility room also serves as laundry room since washing and drying will be done on the ground floor
• Children’s rooms facing south are mandatory, each at least 15sqm (161 sqft)
• Walk-in closet would be nice but not mandatory; better to have larger children’s rooms
• We prefer rectangular floor plans over square ones, partly because this leaves more room for the south-facing garden. And yes, I know squares are also rectangles.
• Layout in L-shape with living (south), dining (south-west) and kitchen (west) is basically fixed. The “I” shape did not appeal to us in any show home.
• Terrace will be on the south side
• A small path directly from kitchen to south-facing terrace is also planned

House Design
Whose design is it:
- Based on various floor plans from skilled forum members

What do you like most? Why?

• Platform staircase — our absolute favorite
• Not too deep building volume (9.4m / 31 feet) allows for more garden space
• Ground floor
• Living-dining area plus kitchen fits our requirements. We saw this in a show home and immediately agreed on this look.
• Office saves me constant stair climbing on home office days
• Utility room is probably large enough for technical equipment and laundry
• Upper floor
• Large and equally sized children’s rooms facing south
• Second bathroom on the upper floor is practical
• Bedroom facing west was important to us (evening sun). To the east, the neighbor’s semi-detached house with 2.5 floors would be very close (currently just a guess)

What don’t you like? Why?

• No backup kitchen — possibly make the walk-in closet smaller and move guest WC to the niche near office or utility room to create a small backup kitchen
• If backup kitchen is not feasible, then at least pantry under the stairs and slightly smaller utility room
• Bathroom could be a bit wider to accommodate a T-layout, which we really like

Price estimate according to architect/planner: ...
Personal price limit for the house including equipment: 500,000
Preferred heating technology: geothermal heat pump (or local heating network)

If you had to give up on something, which details/extensions
- Can you do without: garage
- Cannot do without:

Why did the design end up the way it is now? For example:,
Which of your wishes were implemented by the architect?
We studied various floor plans here in the forum and this is the result. Furniture (office, children’s rooms) and bathroom fittings are still missing here and there.

What makes it particularly good or bad in your opinion?
We like it, but there is certainly room for improvement here and there. The floor plan is already oriented almost perfectly.

If your drawing software already includes the function to display floor plans transparently in an overview, in my opinion, you should also make use of these "guidelines." At the very least, the windows of the utility room and bathroom being offset but aligned vertically will more often be seen as a "mistake" rather than "unconventional" in the end.

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When I read the questionnaire, I thought, "Oh, this fits well... very well thought out..." then I saw the floor plan. So, several points:

• Given the space requirements, in my opinion, a side entrance to the house would be easier to plan. The "problem" is visible due to the very large hallway, which is mostly circulation space with limited use. Also, not all rooms are placed very efficiently (see point 2).
• The guest toilet is rather inconveniently located. You have to walk through the cloakroom and the dirty area to get there. That will be annoying in everyday life.
• You enter and face a half wall to the half-open living area. I would do this differently: close off the living area, but have a large door (sliding, double door, whatever) to be able to open up the space most of the time. This relates to privacy when the children are older and upstairs.
• The idea of having a closet/shelving area in the office/utility room is good, but the hallway is extremely dark due to the lack of windows there.
• The budget will be tight for this house size.

If it were possible (I don't know), I would probably redesign like this (which also has some downsides):

• Entrance on the east side, where the "closet niches" are now.
• Office and living area roughly stay where they are.
• Arrange the rooms on the north side in the following order: cloakroom, guest toilet, utility room, staircase (staircase direction reversed compared to now). Make sure the hallway isn’t too narrow (I would recommend at least 140cm (55 inches)). For lighting, a window at the stair landing and possibly a door with a glass element in the utility room could bring light into the hallway. Since this reduces circulation space in the hallway, it might even make a backup kitchen possible.
• Note: This will shift the rooms upstairs! If the staircase is reversed, the ascent will probably be roughly where the current children's bathroom or WC is. To make it fit, the order on the ground floor might need to be: cloakroom, utility room, staircase, guest toilet. Downside: a more corridor-like hallway but less circulation space (probably about 1/3 less), guest toilet no longer so far away, and possibly space for a backup kitchen.

I’d like to straightforwardly ask what a backup kitchen is? Is it for when there’s a quarrel and people don’t want to eat together anymore? Or if you decide to divide the house later on? Maybe it’s the less attractive kitchen so the main one stays nice and clean? In the past, there used to be second kitchens for the staff, and my parents’ or grandparents’ generation often stored old kitchen furniture in the basement and used those spaces as laundry rooms. By the way, we have that in our garage...

Regarding the floor plan: I find the children’s rooms a bit too large for practical furnishing. This probably creates unused space that doesn’t necessarily increase the living value for the child. To save space in the ground floor hallway, you could make the office accessible from the living room and shorten the hallway in favor of the office and utility room. The office/living room door probably won’t be open all the time and therefore won’t cause unnecessary disturbance.

I see no issue with the location of the guest bathroom and the “dirty area.” You don’t walk through the barn daily, and dirty work shoes can be taken off right at the door. For everything else, the robot vacuum cleans here every day. We also come in wearing shoes, roll the stroller inside, etc., and sometimes there’s just a leaf on the doormat or some soil from the shoe treads. But that’s easily taken care of with one vacuuming. You can also teach children and husbands to step only on the extra-large doormat.

Schmirgel schrieb:

I’d like to straightforwardly ask, what exactly is a backup kitchen?

A mini or auxiliary kitchen located out of sight that provides extra countertop space—you can use it, for example, for food preparation or to store dirty dishes, pots, and pans so they don’t clutter the main kitchen when guests are over. It can be a wall unit in a large pantry room, for instance. Often equipped with some appliances, but that’s not mandatory.

Of course, it takes up significant space on the ground floor, which also affects the upper floor. Since the budget is already tight (although the local heating system helps somewhat with initial costs)—what exactly is included in the $500k for the house (just the building shell? With garage or carport? Additional construction costs? Landscaping, driveway, and so on)?

11ant schrieb:

If your drawing software already offers the feature to display floor plans transparently in an overview, I believe you should definitely make use of these "guidelines."

Thank you for the suggestion.

Papierturm schrieb:

The "problem" is visible due to the very large hallway, which is a lot of circulation space with limited practical use.

Unfortunately, that’s true.

Papierturm schrieb:

The guest toilet is rather poorly located.

Another idea was to place the guest toilet on the east side, where the two niches are now. In either case, the path to the guest toilet remains quite long.

Papierturm schrieb:

If it were possible (which I don’t know), I would probably redesign it like this (which also has its drawbacks):

We tried that. If we keep the current placement with the open plan living/dining/kitchen area, we would end up with a 7-meter (23 feet) long corridor, which is absolutely out of the question. In my opinion, the variant with the east entrance works perfectly if the kitchen is located where the living room currently is. However, we want to keep the kitchen in the west and the living room in the east.