Do you prefer an "open floor plan," or do you prefer some sort of divider between rooms?

I love toying with designing my own space and as a former int. design and home staging asst. I have many ideas.
Now days after raising a family and being single/divorced for years I prefer an open floor plan. If I could design the perfect little house for myself it would be one huge room with a kitchenette and separate bathroom but the rest would be a huge room with a fireplace, a sitting/living area and my bedroom scene all in one large, open room. I would place my bed near the fireplace at one end of the room, maybe with a decorative screen or curtains around the bed, a large area rug and then set up the living area at the opposite end with lots of open space in between.

I would then create a small breakfast nook/eating area on one side with, perhaps a bistro table. I would also have lots of windows to maximize the open floor plan. Hardwood floors with bold area rugs and a general color scheme that could be easily changed around with colorful accents such as throw pillows, area rugs, etc.
I am moving to a studio apartment soon on a large property and am very excited about how I will set things up. :-)

visually, open. it makes the room look more spacious, and you also get more light into the room because of additional windows in the kitchen area.
it also makes it easier to place a camera without having to resort to ridiculously small focal lenghts.

practically though, closed. when you burn food, which will eventually happen, you can limit the burnt stench to the kitchen.

It depends, but I think in general walls and halls and doors, and arches, etc, can be wonderful, and when done well, are better than having one giant open space.

As you say, it’s good not to see everything at once. It creates multiple spaces with different character / nature, rather than one giant arena.

I like at least a ¼ wall between rooms. What I abhor, though, are the house plans that have you walk into the front door and the kitchen is directly to your left or right with the entire thing in plain view.

I like a great room, with the kitchen as an alcove off to the side with an eating area between the kitchen portion and the family room portion.

And that would be separate from a living/dining room.

My solution is a 2 story house with the first floor given to open space. For entertaining you can’t beat it. And I don’t care who can view the dirty dishes. In fact, after a flute or 2 of champagne, the folks uneasy at the sight of dirty dishes invariably snatch an apron off the wall and wash them while the rest of us mill around them and participate. The big problem with this is that after the event, those washed and dried utensils are often missing for weeks from their normal resting places and pop up in the damnedest unpredictable locations.

I can tell you from places I’ve visited, the nice thing, in my opinion, is when the kitchen is open to the living area and a small eating area, so when entertaining, the host is within view of the guests and it’s like a big hangout. If there’s something on TV that the person or people in the kitchen want to watch (like an awards show or Super Bowl or something), the host can do so while prepping food.

I am more of a separate room person and I have lived
in both kind of houses. It was nice to have an open floor
plan when we were younger and the kids were younger too
so we could keep an eye on them. Not that it is just us two
we made the kitchen separate because it seems I am always
in the kitchen making noise and the person in the den couldn’t
hear the tv or take a nap. We also went for a 1 story house
and put the master suite on one end with my office and a guest
bedroom. KItchen and den in the middle then on the other wing
2 bedrooms and a tv room and bathroom and laundry room.
LOVE my one story house much better than the 2 story as we
could always hear the kiddos running upstairs. Now I can walk
thru our house from one end to the other with the lights out and
not bump into anything. We designed the house ourselves and
it is perfect! Had it pre-wired for wi-fi and hard wood floors in most
of the house.

I liked the fact that the kids’ rooms were above mine. I could keep an ear on them through the night….. ;)

Walls and doors.

I love to cook, and I prepare some very elaborate meals. I bang pots, stir vigorously, use noisy appliances, and make some real messes. I don’t want to worry about disturbing people with all that ruckus. And, what’s the fun of setting a nice table, and serving good food, only to eat next to an ugly war zone? I also don’t want my guests chatting with me when I’m trying to focus on getting the meuniere sauce perfect.

A couple of years ago, I renovated my mother’s house, an early-20th century Cape Cod, to prepare it for sale. A parade of contractors told me to remove the wall between the kitchen and dining room. I refused. “Open Floor Plan” would have violated the history and mood of a century-old house. More importantly, I knew all too well how effectively that wall contained cooking odors, noises, and messes.

Yep. Although I think the older, much more spacious houses lent themselves to walls and door better than today’s relatively dinky houses.

I prefer all open spaces. I am in the family room, and I can see past the extended counter to the kitchen (the dishes are hidden in the double sink) and into the living/library/computer room through the open space hallway, which gives me a view throught the window to the courtyard in front yard. I am sitting in front of the sliding glass door that leads out to the covered patio/playroom and through to the swimming pool in the back yard.

Even the wall in the hall is ¾ up with access to the bedrooms.

I dislike open plan and much prefer small rooms based on function; dining, sleeping, study etc.

Ideally, I would love one giant room for living/dining/kitchen/den and a large separate bedroom with a private bath. I like large indoor spaces and lots of light.

The living areas in my house are pretty open, but we have zones. I wouldn’t want one huge room.

I like an open plan, because everyone winds up in the kitchen usually anyway. Plus, hallways can make rooms smaller. Open plans feel less formal, and a great room plan means not waisting space on two “living” rooms.

Although, in cold climates having rooms you can close off can be a big heat saver, and also help you keep warm in the room you are in.

An open plan can be more difficult to control noise. If someone is in the kitchen you might hear the banging throughout the house. It’s harder to keep people out if the kitchen if you don’t want them there.

I like best an open plan that provides a door or two to close of zones for not only the heat, but also the noise. My last house was like that. We also had a walk through pantry behind the kitchen so if people were over, and you needed a quick place to put dirty baking dishes and platters, you could set them back there for the duration of a party. Moreover, we had two dishwashers, so ample room to “hide” dirty dishes. My realtor said my house had features you usually only see in million dollar homes twice the size. You can put those features in moderately sized homes too.

I have open kitchen, dining area, living area and one thing I wish I had is a closed off living room. Not in this house, because what’s here suits the space, but if I had a bigger house, I always thought it would be great to have a closed off living room with French doors (for the openness and light) to keep the cats out of the space.

Closed. Especially kitchens, and especially in Florida. I like to keep my house dark, as it helps with cooling costs. Blackout curtains and high efficiency lightbulbs. Half the time I don’t know whether it’s day or night outside. I like it that way.

LOL! You vampire you.

I wish I could just wall up my windows.
no more pesky sunlight, no more annoying birds preventing me to sleep at 4 in the morning.

I’m with you. I like individual rooms. However on the plus side of a kitchen sharing the dining room, I like to be able to talk to people sometimes as I cook. I don’t like it when it’s kitchen dining room and living room all rolled into one. Then people get lost in watching tv or are too far to hear. I like having them in my kitchen. And if I don’t want people in my kitchen, I like the option of them being in another room, like the living room.
My cousin has it together and it can get annoying when you are trying to watch something and can’t properly hear it because people are having conversations in the kitchen/ dining room. Someone is always bound to be annoyed.

I walked through a very nice (and very expensive) house today. They had no less than 3 eating places. One was the formal dining room, the other was in the finished basement, in front of a huge flat screen,with seating for the whole KC football team and the third was in the kitchen area. You had your stove and stuff, then an island and on the other side of the island was seating, couches and stuff and another TV, but the cook was right there with them. I liked that a lot.
Oh…make that 4 eating areas. They had a sunroom too.

^^Even though I got rid of the formal living room, I still have always had a formal dining and a breakfast room, and a part of me wants to get rid of having two eating places. It’s just hard for me to get rid of my dining room table, both for sentimental reasons and I still love it. The thing is it’s not the table I would want to eat at every day.

I toyed with the idea of making an old, 2nd story gymnasium into a home, briefly. Only the bedroom partitioned. I still think it would have been cool.

If I have a choice I insist on a formal dining room too. So in my little 1800 sq ft house I have an antique, round oak table that I can add leaves too, and off the kitchen is a short hallway (that wasn’t a hallway when I moved in! But I have these wild and crazy guys around who don’t let a little thing like a wall stop them from making Mom’s casual thoughts come true…) anyway, have a short hallway to a “formal” dining room. Which also has my computer stuff in it.