ᐅ Floor plan layout of the ground floor and upper floor

Hello everyone,

I would like to get some external feedback on our floor plan.

My main focus is on the layout. The ground floor should accommodate everything needed for daily living. The upper floor will additionally include a guest room and a spacious office.

I omitted the wall thicknesses in the quick sketch.

I look forward to your opinions.

Best regards,
Fabian

Hello,

personally, I find that oddly curved hallway a bit bothersome. I’m not generally against such designs, but an entrance area like that belongs more in a castle or a mansion...

You have planned two bathrooms, but neither has a window (--> ventilation). In new construction, never use interior bathrooms without windows!

The entire floor plan has too many unnecessary corners and edges. Using the bathroom as a walkthrough room is very unfortunate.

The door to the utility room is rather poorly positioned.

When designing, you need to make sure everything fits properly. That means working to scale, including wall thicknesses and windows, with elevations and all floor plan levels. Also, fully furnish all rooms to scale.

Best regards

Chaap schrieb:
I would like to get some external feedback on our floor plan.
My main concern is the layout. The ground floor should accommodate everything needed for living. The upper floor will additionally include a guest room and a spacious office. I left out the wall thicknesses in the quick sketch. I am looking forward to your opinions.

Hello Fabian,

First of all, in the end the offer will likely start with a “4”; I hope you understand that? With roughly 160 square meters (about 1,722 square feet) of living space per floor as a KfW-efficient house, this is not a small construction project. According to your proposal, your plot should have a building envelope of 19.0 meters (62 feet) at the front; whether the garage may exceed the building volume by an estimated 4.0 meters (13 feet) will need to be confirmed by your building authority (building permit / planning permission office).

I don’t think the rounded hallway area is bad, even though E.Curbs’s objection is understandable. A width of 12.00 meters (39 feet) allows for such design features to some extent. What I find less fortunate is the separation of the living area; the protrusion of the walk-in closet creates a corner inside the main living space. It would be better to balance the playful entrance area with more straightforward architecture, so to speak; that means aligning the walk-in closet wall to the same height as the utility room wall opposite it. In my opinion, this corresponds very well.

The arrangement “bedroom – bathroom – walk-in closet” is also unfortunate – do you want to walk through all those rooms every time to get to the living room or the kitchen? Here I would consider adding an extra access to the hallway, moving the spiral staircase about 1 to 1.5 meters (3 to 5 feet) toward the main entrance; changing the room layout itself probably won’t help much in this regard.

Following this, I would suggest thinking about shifting the entrance area one meter (3 feet) into the hallway to create a covered entrance with two side sections.

The main access to the utility room should be through the hallway; if you also want access from the kitchen, ask your kitchen designer. Nowadays there are practical built-in cabinet solutions that allow dual access; alternatively, an internal sliding door can be installed to keep the wall surfaces available for furniture.

The garage will also be a sizable expense since it needs to be built with masonry due to this extended length and width. Prefabricated garages come in fixed modules—3 by 6 or 3 by 9 meters (about 10 by 20 or 10 by 30 feet). Anything beyond that—especially deviations from the standard width of 3.0 meters (10 feet)—requires special and additional transportation, including applications for escort vehicles and such.

Regarding lighting, I could imagine using floor-to-ceiling window elements exclusively in the terrace area; the other windows would be half-height windows. A nice solution is to limit the half-height window sill to 70 cm (28 inches), then extend the window with safety glass up to the legally required sill height of 90 cm (35 inches), and have one or two flaps above for ventilation. These window elements are called “transom windows”; they have the advantage that no so-called French balconies need to be installed on the upper floor, and the windows themselves are easy to clean from the inside due to the short safety glass section.

Best regards