Floor plan design single-family house solid wood construction 140 sqm in Lower Saxony

I definitely find Katja's design better; the sense of space is more open, you come directly from the kitchen out onto the terrace AND also into the storage room, where it is planned to store less frequently used items, and I think the drink crates will also be moved there.

Overall, in this design, the available square meters are better utilized, and you get a feeling of more space than in the convoluted original design.
I’ll quote our architect again: a good floor plan must be one you can pee on in the snow!
That works with this one.

However, I would probably choose a large patio door in the living room instead of the window seat. Whether it is a sliding lift door or a double-wing patio door does not matter.

I just find it nice to go directly from the living area onto the terrace.

I rather have the feeling that the connection between the floor plan and possible furnishing is not yet entirely clear.

It seems to me that the furnishing of the bathroom follows the motto: "this does not belong to the scope of delivery of the shell builder, so we will clarify this calmly once the shell is built." There seems to be a lack of awareness that a downpipe cannot be "installed" as easily as an electrical cable. If you only "lay out" the objects "when it really matters" and take the consequence that you want to get up from the bathtub without bumping your head, this can result in having to classify the shower or the second washbasin as sacrificial lambs. This will be somewhat different with kitchen planning (although I personally will not miss an island). Here, an object will be less likely to be sacrificed – but with quite a high probability, a late planning will backfire in the arrangement, i.e. in practice in the travel expenses of those running the kitchen. Even just when washing up by hand: planning makes the difference between whether the paths of the person washing and the one drying cross seven times or forty-eight times. Roughly the same applies between cereal eaters and fried egg eaters, etc. Especially when the house is realized as an untested floor plan draft, the "internal planning" requires correspondingly more attention.

I don’t waste a single thought on symmetry below 250 sqm. My suggestions are always to be understood conceptually, not as wall-shifting in the respective concrete floor plan with its dimensional consequences. I just noticed that the ground floor plan practically invites a captain’s gable, which makes the roof windows obsolete. At these dimensions, however, the gable is split between the two children’s rooms, which in my opinion is way too much for dying and too little for living, hence my suggestion to assign it only to the children’s room and not also to the spare room. Furthermore, I was thinking in terms of a young family and DIY in the direction of instead of .

Thank you for the suggestion. We are actually thinking about it – however, there is the problem here that we would destroy the southwest terrace if we moved the gable with the dining nook further west to the living room – that would make the way from the kitchen even longer. We originally wanted the captain’s gable as well – but unfortunately not feasible upstairs at the current location – just as you said. If it came to the east towards the kitchen, we would open the kitchen to the dining area, but then there would only be room for a small L-shaped kitchen counter – which probably wouldn’t be enough for me, as the kitchen is not just decoration... I also wouldn’t find swapping kitchen and living room optimal due to the location; both should roughly stay where they currently are.

My criticism does not principally apply to either your shown floor plan or the "block" house, nor would I advocate for the plaster house. My association with Flair 113 also arises from the fact that I see it as comparable in the sense that I would have felt the floor plan shown here never ever had less than 140 sqm. If the priority lies on a shell construction basis, I see that as at least equally well achievable with a wooden frame panel model or as an aerated concrete kit house. A log house as a construction method alone is fine, only in combination with an individual planning do alarm bells ring for me (not to be confused with a disaster guarantee!) – simply because that implies that the design has not been concretely "proven to work"; the height restrictions are no joke.

Doesn’t every individual floor plan then have to have been built 50 times beforehand to see if it works? :D

Do you have structural concerns about our currently planned room program, completely aside from the minor changes we will make based on your previous feedback? The floor plan shown here was coordinated with the statics engineer of the manufacturer, so everything fits from that side. We are working on the height restrictions according to the development plan, but that probably won’t become more concrete until the weekend – I’m still hoping that we can gain at least three or four dozen centimeters upstairs.

I find the ridge direction unfortunate, which the development plan strictly prescribes (and does not tie to the floor plan). The easiest remedy in my opinion is obvious because the house orientation is unfavorable: west bedroom, south living kitchen, bay window to the neighbor. The top of the plan points to about 10 degrees (NNE), I would find it more favorable rotated to 100 degrees (ESE). Absolute heights worry me much more here than the comparatively remote risk of two-storey.

I can’t quite imagine in my head what exactly you want to rotate… Could you try to explain that more precisely? Thank you very much! :)

I also find it quite old-fashioned – but there are people who like that. The round arch into the cloakroom is one of those things from the 70s – do you really want that? In my opinion, it doesn’t really fit a wooden house whose interior walls remain as planks. That means routing a round arch into the horizontal structure of the planks – which I honestly find terrible. The round arches are not necessarily a design element that excites me even on a white wall, but at least there the whole thing doesn’t work against the linear structure of a wooden wall. Think about it again, I believe it will look quite dreadful.

Arch or just finishing off with a plank is not a decisive factor. In the show house it felt quite fitting and charming to us – I didn’t consciously perceive it as consciously 70s and old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s also because I hardly ever enter new-build houses and therefore am obviously really not up-to-date. We currently live in a 200-year-old half-timbered house with approximate internal dimensions of 4.50m x 15.00m – so for us much of our design is an absolute improvement compared to now. The point about the round structure regarding the expected settling of the house is very good, thanks – we will definitely ask more concretely if there are references with a few years of experience, and if not, we will replace the arch with a straight plank. We will undoubtedly visit again and look at the workmanship closely before ordering something like that concretely. :)

The kitchen might be from the 80s, but not more than that – it could be better. I wouldn’t want it like that.

What makes an 80s kitchen different from a 2020s kitchen? Rustic oak vs. high gloss with a kitchen island bar counter? Few cabinets and work surfaces because often the kitchen is just installed for decoration anyway? The topic of a kitchen island came up here again at some point – making the kitchen itself somewhat more inviting than fitting it into a 3x3 meter U layout would certainly also be in our interest. However, I have never worked at one of those kitchen island things (doesn’t stuff constantly fall off all four sides?) and that bar counter solution is really not for me. But we will definitely still work on the kitchen arrangement. Do you have a suggestion on how to better design the kitchen? Actually without a kitchen island, but more open/inviting if possible. :)

The seating area looks so cozy but is a disaster in real life. I speak from experience, my parents have something like that. Expensive carpenter installation; we moved in in 1974, and my parents were so proud of the seating area. In the end, kids always sat in the back on the bench because they could easily crawl out if someone needed to go to the bathroom during the meal. And crawling out means: standing on the bench and walking all around everyone’s back until you’re outside. Otherwise, everyone stands up until the one in the middle at the back is out. And even that is no fun — just try it once in a furniture store: take a conventional corner bench and slide along the table on the bench from one end to the other. That’s roughly what you have to do if you sit in the back on the bench and want to get there or get out again. It’s annoying! I would strongly advise against it! But it fits the 70s-80s era – people had that then. So basically consistent. But not practical.

In real life, we won’t sit at the table daily with the extended family and 9 children. However, without this extended seating area, with 140 sqm, we would hardly have the possibility to invite more than 6-8 guests for dinner – otherwise, you have the same problems: The big uncle sits right at the bottleneck, if someone wants to get around everyone has to move, and in the end someone stumbles and spills the potatoes all over the table. In everyday life, the child doesn’t push the chair back properly and I catch my little toe on it because everything is too narrow. I absolutely understand your point; my grandparents also had a corner bench at the dining area. For me, however, it has always been rather cozy and very sociable than annoying. A little moving up instead of having to fetch the dusty chair from the basement because someone came spontaneously. The core of our dining nook is not only the bench itself but also the windows on three sides with a certain conservatory character.

Take a normal table with chairs/bench/benches and make the window into a patio door; then the way from the kitchen to the terrace is no longer a world trip.

I was just mentally going through the floor plans of our families and our friends. None of them have direct access to the main terrace from the kitchen – these are also connected to the living rooms or worse. Even those who built new homes 10 years ago ;) According to the current plan, it would be about 5 meters from the kitchen edge to the patio door – without needing to zigzag, because the dining nook takes up less space and is not in the middle of the room… Is that really an absolute no-go nowadays? Currently, I take two steps from my kitchen through a small hallway, then two steps down, two steps through the main hallway, through the living room door, then seven meters to the other side of the living/dining room to the patio door :D 5 meters of straight path without obstacles is really cool by comparison. Are my standards simply too low for a new build that I see fundamental improvements as a success and good, but looking at it objectively it is still dumb and impractical? Maybe that also explains our conservative ideas – what the farmer doesn’t know and all that. But for us, that feels “righter” than when I look at “new build floor plan trends 2022” now. Just thinking about it already makes me uncomfortable… Square city villa with anthracite large-format tiles and white plastered walls, we both just find totally awful – for others, that is the ultimate. We consciously chose a solid log house because we find that extremely cozy. Comfortably warm, cuddly, homely… But still, thank you very much for your honest critique :)

and who wants a hallway stub that is the path to the emergency toilet and sinks into darkness? Then the fear of tripping over a shoe... a window belongs there.

Window is noted. Your objection is plausible... What size do you recommend?

... and you asked about window sizes: at least 10% of the living area is necessary. You have that. Quite a few people have 30%.

Wow, that looks like more windows than the minimum in the plan somehow. We definitely do not want to intentionally save on windows - how can I optimize that? Is there a rule of thumb for window sizes based on room sizes or wall widths? What would be a minimum width/height of windows for our current rooms in your opinion?