ᐅ Design for a Single-Family Home of 160-180 sqm – Suggestions for Improvement?

Stairs to the upper floor via the stairs from the basement, which means the upper floor must be redesigned:

Bathroom + walk-in closet + bedroom to the north, living areas to the south, done. Designing stairs not aligned on top of each other is probably the biggest, most unnecessary waste of space there is.
If you’re building 300m² (3,230 sq ft), you can do that, but here?

I’m not planning any changes right now since the main issue is the staircase. Here is my personal opinion on the current floor plan:

- The living room is too narrow at about 3.10m to 3.20m (10.2 to 10.5 feet). It will feel like a long corridor, nothing more, nothing less.
- The entrance to the living room could be a bit more substantial. I’m thinking of a frosted glass sliding door, but not with dimensions of 0.885m (2.9 feet).
- What is the purpose of the second toilet on the ground floor? Are you planning for an au pair?
- The kitchen is approximately 2 x 4m (6.6 x 13.1 feet), so your ground floor bathroom is almost the same size.
- The shifted staircase takes up a massive amount of space you simply don’t have. Because of that, both the living room and kitchen are too small for a floor area of over 200sqm (2153 sq ft)!
- I understand that the walk-in closet or similar is planned on the north side, but a walk-in closet without direct access to the bedroom is, to put it mildly, very illogical—especially if you have the space. Instead, separate the bedroom from the staircase area, make it smaller, and create a direct passage to the bathroom (move the bed closer to the window beforehand).
- The orientation of the rooms relative to the cardinal directions is good but not the real issue (→ the staircase remains the main problem).
- One more thing I noticed! The window dimensions are not rough opening sizes—they are too unusual for that. I’m not familiar with this. In my experience, rough opening sizes are always used in the initial planning. If these sizes are accepted as rough openings by the shell builder (especially if the dimension is carried through all plans), you’ll end up with tiny windows :-p

That definitely helps. Unfortunately, I can't upload the measurements because the files are apparently too large. At the moment, the living room is planned to be 3.80 m (12.5 ft) wide. Is that too narrow, like a corridor? The sliding door in the living room is a good point. Overall, we were considering widening by up to 1 m (3.3 ft) to make the bathroom on the upper floor and the kitchen wider. On the ground floor, there should not be a second toilet, but rather the whole room should replace the wardrobe—which is actually not needed; there should be enough space for coats etc. in the hallway. This would create a bend in the living room upstairs. Not sure if that makes sense.

Even bigger
You already have an extra room on the upper floor, right, or is it planned to be used as a child's room?

For 2 or 3 people, the space could be utilized more efficiently given its size.

Why is the thoughtfully planned cloakroom on the ground floor turned into a second toilet?

The floor area in this size is so common that you can find countless floor plans for it in any house building catalog. It’s best to visit a show home park to get a live impression and better understand the floor plans.

The kitchen is also carelessly squeezed in at this spot. A corner staircase (with basement, ground floor, and first floor stacked) would also save a lot of space.

Corner stairs or something similar have never really appealed to us – I find it easier to use a straight staircase. But if both staircases are placed directly above each other, wouldn’t that likely cause an issue separating the temperature between the ground floor and the basement? The basement wouldn’t normally be heated or insulated.