Floor plan improvement tips? Can you help?

Good day,

we have basically already decided on the floor plan and a general contractor. We like the floor plan very much as it takes all our wishes into account. These were:
- Ground floor: open kitchen with kitchen island, an additional larger room (initially an office, later a bedroom), bright (many windows), guest bathroom, access from the kitchen to the utility room (storage for beverage crates, canned goods, etc.), storage room under the stairs
- Upper floor: two not too small children's rooms facing south, passage along the house wall from the parents' bedroom through the dressing room to the bathroom, bathroom with an additional entrance from the hallway, bathroom layout, small "emergency room" (office, guests, in case a third child comes)

However, there is something bothering us about the floor plan:
- the living/dining/kitchen area feels a bit cramped and narrow, the kitchen island should actually be larger/wider
does it only seem that way or is it actually like that?

The idea was to simply move the stairs slightly (about 30-50 cm) towards the entrance area. In addition, the wall between the utility room and kitchen could also be moved accordingly. But none of this is possible because then you wouldn’t be able to get to the bathroom upstairs anymore. We cannot get around this with a knee-wall height increase either, since we are only allowed to build a single story (Lower Saxony 66% upper floor of ground floor) and that would exceed the 66%. Overall, we don’t actually want to build bigger (162 m2 living space should be enough and the budget is tight).

Do you have any ideas on how we could solve the "problem"?
Maybe you even have more tips for optimization?!

We would be grateful for every tip/every idea.

Best regards

we have basically decided on the floor plan and a general contractor. [...] However, something about the floor plan bothers us: - the living/dining/kitchen area feels a bit cramped and narrow, the kitchen island should actually be bigger/wider does it just seem that way or is it really like that? The idea was to simply move the staircase a bit (about 30-50cm) towards the entrance area.

Strange: at first glance the design seems to me like a "pushing back to the original position" for the staircase (?) Overall, the design has what I’d call a "dollhouse-like" feel, and yes, also bottlenecks and small-scale details. These are regularly the effects when standard floor plans are shrunk/stretched or divided into more rooms/zones, so roughly speaking "rooms become chambers." The dining table is standing right in the middle of the way, as if the biggest cop in the whole precinct had been placed directly in the intersection. Remove the clearly redundant exit here, then you can rotate the table by 90°.

However, something about the floor plan bothers us:

That's just how typical house models are, some things are a bit tight. Because a standard house can't cover all individualities and lifestyles.

Do you have any ideas on how we could solve the "problem"?

I would suggest simply filling out the pinned questionnaire. Plot, orientation, knee wall height... you need to know all that if you want to present suggestions for moving walls to you. It would also be good to know where the general contractor plans the load-bearing walls.