We didn't remove a wall, we removed a choice

I specified an open floor plan once.

Knocked down the wall myself, on paper at least, and told the client it would make the space feel bigger.

It did.

It also meant she could hear her husband’s work calls from the kitchen, smell dinner from the bedroom, and never once close a door and just be alone in her own home.

She didn’t complain. She just started working from a coffee shop instead.

That’s when it hit me.

We didn’t remove a wall. We removed a choice.

Open-plan living was sold as freedom.

More light, more flow, more togetherness, less of the house wasted on hallways nobody photographed anyway.

Nobody mentioned what got lost along with the wall.

Privacy wasn’t inefficiency. It was a feature we didn’t know we were designing out.

A closed door used to mean something.

It meant you could cry without an audience, take a call without narrating it to the whole house, or just sit in a room that wasn’t also everyone else’s room.

Open-plan took that option away and called it connection.

Sometimes it is connection.

A lot of the time, it’s just four people in one space, all silently agreeing to pretend they have privacy they don’t.

I still design open spaces. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But I ask a different question now, before I remove anything load bearing or otherwise.

Where does everyone in this house go when they need a door that actually closes?

If there’s no answer, we haven’t opened up the floor plan.

We’ve just made the whole house into one room, and called it more space instead of less privacy!!!