How to Break up Your Open Floor Plan, According to Interior Designers

When people talk about open-concept homes, they rave about how easy they make entertaining or how lovely it is to be able to see their entire living area as they prepare dinner.

They don’t mention the fact that all of your dirty dishes are visible when you’re hosting a party, that they can make it impossible to read in your dining area when someone else is watching TV on the couch, or that if one item is left out on the counter, it might be distracting to your eye.

Open-concept floor plans were all the rage in home design for a while, becoming a staple on home-improvement shows and on aesthetically pleasing Instagram feeds. However, the style has become less popular in recent years as people instead gravitate toward more distinct spaces that better serve their day-to-day needs.

Business Insider spoke to interior-design experts about why the change is happening and how people can create more distinction in their open spaces.

Open-concept spaces are becoming less popular

Professionals in the design world pointed to the fact that open-concept homes aren’t always ideal for day-to-day living as the reason behind the shift away from the design style, as became evident when people started working remotely.

“We love that sense of openness and airiness, and yet when we were all stuck in our homes all the time with our significant others, we all kind of had that sense of, ‘How do you carve out privacy and a sense of your own space in a home?'” Heather Goerzen, the director of content and design at Havenly, a company that partners people with interior designers, told Business Insider. 

“All of our homes that became one big open room were suddenly not conducive to living,” Rachel Stults, the managing editor at Realtor.com, echoed to Business Insider. “It created a desire to have a defined space, or at least the ability to close one off if you need to.”

Now, many people are craving more definition in their homes, with some going so far as to literally build new rooms to create that sense of separation.

“We have seen people put up more definition if they can by putting up walls or looking for homes that have a closed-off kitchen or a closed-off dining room,” Stults said.

Dan Mazzarini, the creative director at BHDM Design and an expert in both interior design and home staging, told Business Insider it’s particularly important to think about how to break up your open-concept space if you’re staging your home for sale, as you want to show potential buyers the multitude of ways they can use the area.

“You might have used your house one way, but ask your broker for their point of view about what people are looking for in this kind of market and in that kind of open-concept space,” he said. 

If you don’t want to move or physically add walls to your home, there are plenty of ways to break up your space using decor accessories or furniture you already have, as the designers told Business Insider. 

The key to breaking up your open space is focusing on function

When breaking up an open-concept home, you want to visually display that different parts of the space can have different functions, Mazzarini told Business Insider.

“People need to understand how they can use the space,” he said.

The designers said one easy way to create separate areas within a home was to use the furniture to literally break it up.

For instance, instead of placing your couch against a wall, you can put it in the center of a room to separate it from the dining area, or you can use a console table to act as a barrier that breaks up the living area and the kitchen. 

Goerzen said you could also use rugs to delineate space and show different functions in a room.

“A different corresponding or complementary rug in your living space versus your dining space can kind of anchor those two,” she said. 

If you want more separation, Goerzen recommended using furniture with more height, such as a bookshelf or even a folding screen, to create privacy within spaces.

Not everyone loves the look of that height when breaking up a space, though, so you might have to go through some trial and error before you find the solution that works for you.

Focus on what you want the different parts of the room to do, and you’ll end up with a more thought-out space.