A great room is a room inside a house that combines the roles of several more traditional rooms such as the family room, living room, and study into one space. Great rooms typically have raised ceilings and are usually placed at or near the center of the home. Great rooms have been common in American homes since the early 1990s.
The concept of a great room hearkens back to the romanticized ideal of great halls and great chambers in medieval castles and mansions, which contained one large central room where everything happened. Developers of mid-range suburban homes in America tried to solve the problem of the "dead" living room and the split between the living and family rooms by "returning" to the idea of the great room. The general concept is one relatively central room, the crossroads of the house to be used for all of the family functions traditionally split between living and family rooms. The dominant feature of the great room is the raised ceiling, higher than other parts of the house, typically two stories with arching ceilings often referred to in real estate jargon as "cathedral ceilings". [1]
Different great rooms will combine different functions. Some may incorporate a reading area, thus bringing the traditional study function into the scheme of the room, while others may forgo this particular function. Some great room designs incorporate the functions of the traditional dining room as well. In the most general sense, great rooms are typically found on the lower level of American multi-story homes built in the second half of the 20th century. In many houses the great room will also adjoin the kitchen, often separated just by a counter instead of a full wall. [2]
The modern great room concept traces back to the "multipurpose room" in modernist homes built by Joseph Eichler in California in the 1950s and 1960s. [3] Developers started building high-end houses with great rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, at first simply adding vaulted entryways to ranch-style houses. An example of this is the house in the television series The Brady Bunch . Great rooms became a nearly ubiquitous feature of suburban homes constructed in America in the 1990s and 2000s. [4] Great rooms were initially popular with homeowners. According to builders asked by the Wall Street Journal , this was because homeowners wanted a way to show off wealth in a growing economy and thus the The New York Times called the great room "the McMansion's signature space". [5]
By the mid-2000s, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that home buyers were not as enthusiastic about great rooms. Common complaints included the cost to heat and cool them, that they were difficult to clean and paint due to height and irregular angles, and that they simply were wasted space. [4] About 15 years after great rooms became widely popular in the early 1990s, developers across America were getting fewer demands for houses with great rooms. Buyers were preferring instead houses with increased floor space and numbers of rooms. Owners of existing homes with great rooms were sometimes opting to add new rooms or lofts in the great room's ceiling space, which can cost as much as 50% less than adding a conventional addition to the house. According to the United States Census Bureau, from 2005 to 2007 expenditures on the interior restructuring of homes rose by about 40%, but spending on new-room additions fell by 57%, which a census bureau statistician said can be explained in part by the retrofitting of great rooms. [4] However, much of the motivation for working within the existing footprint of the home may be due to state and municipal regulations which may trigger higher taxes, additional permit hurdles, or septic system redesigns when a building's footprint increases.
In 2007, Money listed great rooms as a fad whose time had passed. The magazine reported that a typical great room costs $150 to $350 per square foot, whereas building conventional rooms cost $125 to $250 a square foot, and concluded that the supposed benefits of a great room (unifying family activities into one room) did not justify its cost and maintenance difficulties. [2]
A house is a single-unit residential building, which may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex, structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses may have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock may share part of the house with humans.
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator, and worktops and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and other electric appliances. The main functions of a kitchen are to store, prepare and cook food. The room or area may also be used for dining, entertaining and laundry. The design and construction of kitchens is a huge market all over the world.
A bungalow is a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof, and may be surrounded by wide verandas.
A basement or cellar is one or more floors of a building that are completely or partly below the ground floor. It generally is used as a utility space for a building, where such items as the boiler, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, car park, and air-conditioning system are located; so also are amenities such as the electrical distribution system and cable television distribution point. In cities with high property prices, such as London, basements are often fitted out to a high standard and used as living space.
A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level. Historically the dining room is furnished with a rather large dining table and a number of dining chairs; the most common shape is generally rectangular with two armed end chairs and an even number of un-armed side chairs along the long sides.
In Western architecture, a living room, also called a lounge room, lounge, sitting room, or drawing room, is a room in a residential house or apartment for relaxing and socializing. Such a room is sometimes called a front room when it is near the main entrance at the front of the house. In large, formal homes, a sitting room is often a small private living area adjacent to a bedroom, such as the Queen's Sitting Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House. The term living room was coined in the late 19th or early 20th century.
A loft can be an upper story or attic in a building, directly under the roof or just a storage space under the roof usually accessed by a ladder. A loft apartment refers to large adaptable open space, often converted for residential use from some other use, often light industrial. Adding to the confusion, some converted lofts include upper open loft areas. Within certain upper loft areas exist even further lofts, which may contain loft areas of their own, and so forth.
A stand-alone house is a free-standing residential building. It is sometimes referred to as a single-family home, as opposed to a multi-family residential dwelling.
In ancient Rome, the domus was the type of town house occupied by the upper classes and some wealthy freedmen during the Republican and Imperial eras. It was found in almost all the major cities throughout the Roman territories. The modern English word domestic comes from Latin domesticus, which is derived from the word domus. The word dom in modern Slavic languages means "home" and is a cognate of the Latin word, going back to Proto-Indo-European. Along with a domus in the city, many of the richest families of ancient Rome also owned a separate country house known as a villa. Many chose to live primarily, or even exclusively, in their villas; these homes were generally much grander in scale and on larger acres of land due to more space outside the walled and fortified city.
The Xanadu Houses were a series of experimental homes built to showcase examples of computers and automation in the home in the United States. The architectural project began in 1979, and during the early 1980s three houses were built in different parts of the US: one each in Kissimmee, Florida; Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin; and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The houses included novel construction and design techniques, and became popular tourist attractions during the 1980s.
Ranch is a domestic architectural style originating in the United States. The ranch-style house is noted for its long, close-to-the-ground profile, and wide open layout. The house style fused modernist ideas and styles with notions of the American Western period of wide open spaces to create a very informal and casual living style. While the original style of the ranch was informal and basic in design, starting around the early 1960s, many ranch-style houses constructed in the United States were increasingly built with more dramatic features like varying roof lines, cathedral ceilings, sunken living rooms, and extensive landscaping and grounds.
A siheyuan is a historical type of residence that was commonly found throughout China, most famously in Beijing and rural Shanxi. Throughout Chinese history, the siheyuan composition was the basic pattern used for residences, palaces, temples, monasteries, family businesses, and government offices. In ancient times, a spacious siheyuan would be occupied by a single, usually large and extended family, signifying wealth and prosperity. Today, remaining siheyuan are often still used as subdivided housing complexes, although many lack modern amenities.
Housing in Japan includes modern and traditional styles. Two patterns of residences are predominant in contemporary Japan: the single-family detached house and the multiple-unit building, either owned by an individual or corporation and rented as apartments to tenants, or owned by occupants. Additional kinds of housing, especially for unmarried people, include boarding houses, dormitories, and barracks.
A rooming house, also called a "multi-tenant house", is a "dwelling with multiple rooms rented out individually", in which the tenants share bathroom and kitchen facilities. Rooming houses are often used as housing for low-income people, as rooming houses are the least expensive housing for single adults, with rents in the $300-$425 CAD range. Rooming houses are usually owned and operated by private landlords. Rooming houses are better described as a "living arrangement" rather than a specially "built form" of housing; rooming houses involve people who are not related living together, often in an existing house, and sharing a kitchen, bathroom, and in some cases a living room or dining room. While there are purpose-built rooming houses, these are rare.
In a building, a room is any space enclosed within a number of walls to which entry is possible only by a door or other dividing structure that connects it either to a passageway, to another room, or to the outdoors, that is large enough for several persons to move about, and whose size, fixtures, furnishings, and sometimes placement within the building support the activity to be conducted in it.
A starter home or starter house is a house that is usually the first which a person or family can afford to purchase, often using a combination of savings and mortgage financing. In the real estate industry the term commonly denotes small one- or two-bedroom houses, often older homes but sometimes low-cost new developments. The concept originated in the United States during the post-World War II era when entry-level home ownership was a preferred option for young families and regarded as part of the American Dream.
Open plan is the generic term used in architectural and interior design for any floor plan which makes use of large, open spaces and minimizes the use of small, enclosed rooms such as private offices. The term can also refer to landscaping of housing estates, business parks, etc., in which there are no defined property boundaries, such as hedges, fences or walls.
A loft conversion or an attic conversion is the process of transforming an empty attic space or loft into a functional room, typically used as a bedroom, office space, a gym, or storage space. Loft conversions are one of the most popular forms of home improvement in the United Kingdom as a result of their numerous perceived benefits. The installation of a loft conversion is a complicated process, and whilst it may be possible to attempt a 'DIY' loft conversion, the large amount of work involved often results in many people choosing to contract a specialist loft conversion company to undertake the task.
The Suntop Homes, also known under the early name of The Ardmore Experiment, were quadruple residences located in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and based largely upon the 1935 conceptual Broadacre City model of the minimum houses. The design was commissioned by Otto Tod Mallery of the Tod Company in 1938 in an attempt to set a new standard for the entry-level housing market in the United States and to increase single-family dwelling density in the suburbs. In cooperation with Frank Lloyd Wright, the Tod Company secured a patent for the unique design, intending to sell development rights for Suntops across the country.
A microapartment, also known as a microflat, is a one-room, self-contained living space, usually purpose built, designed to accommodate a sitting space, sleeping space, bathroom and kitchenette with 14–32 square metres. Unlike a traditional studio flat, residents may also have access to a communal kitchen, communal bathroom/shower, patio and roof garden. The microapartments are often designed for futons, or with pull-down beds, folding desks and tables, and extra-small or hidden appliances. They differ from bedsits, the traditional British bed-sitting room, in that they are self-contained, with their own bathroom, toilet, and kitchenette.
| Shared rooms | |
|---|---|
| Private rooms | |
| Spaces | |
| Utility and storage |
|
| Great house areas | |
| Other | |
| Architectural elements | |
| Related | |
