Open Plan or Defined Rooms? Choosing the Main Floor of a Burnaby Custom Home

The drawing that comes to us with almost every Burnaby custom home inquiry has the same main floor: a kitchen with an island, a dining table beside it, and a living area beyond, one room from the front windows to the back. Owners call it open plan. It photographs well, it suits a narrow Burnaby Heights lot where every wall costs floor area, and for some families it is the right house.

For others it is the layout they will call us about in year four. This is how we walk a family through the choice, and where we usually end up.

What the open plan gives you, and what it takes

The case for open is real. A 33-foot lot in Capitol Hill leaves a main floor that is not wide, and interior walls in that width chop it into corridors. Removing them lets the back windows light the front of the house, lets a parent at the stove see a child on the floor, and makes a modest house feel bigger than its square footage. On a sloped lot with a view over Burnaby Lake, one room means the view reaches the kitchen.

The case against open comes from the same fact. One room means one acoustic space, one air volume, one temperature, and no door. Whatever happens in the kitchen happens in the living room. That is the trade, and the rest of this post is about how each part of it plays out.

Noise and cooking smells travel with the air

Sound is the first complaint. A range hood, a dishwasher and a blender share a room with the television and the person on a work call. Hard finishes make it worse: quartz, tile, a wall of glass and a wood floor reflect sound rather than absorb it, and an open plan usually has all four. The room is loud because nothing stops the sound and nothing absorbs it.

The fixes we build in are covered in our post on acoustic design for a quiet home, and most of them happen in framing: sound-rated assemblies where a wall does exist, resilient channel under a bedroom above the great room, and appliances chosen with a sound rating in hand. An open plan puts more weight on those decisions, because there is no second line of defence.

Smell follows the same physics. Air moves through the whole volume, so whatever is on the stove is on the sofa within a few minutes. A ducted range hood with makeup air, sized for the range under it, does most of the work. A recirculating hood does almost none of it, and we do not install them over a real cooktop. Where a family cooks with a lot of oil or spice every night, the answer is a scullery: a second, smaller kitchen behind the show kitchen with its own hood and a door. Our kitchen design post covers how we lay one out. The show kitchen stays clean for the guests, and the frying happens somewhere with a door.

Heating and cooling one big volume

An open main floor on a Burnaby lot often has a south or west glass wall at one end and the kitchen at the other. In July the glass end overheats while the kitchen end is fine. In January the kitchen end, with the range and the fridge running, is warm while the glass end loses heat all evening. One thermostat in the middle of the room reads an average that describes neither end.

We treat the great room as more than one zone. The mechanical designer sizes the heat pump from a room-by-room heat loss and heat gain calculation rather than from square footage, and the ducting or the radiant loops are split so the glass end and the kitchen end can be run differently. The thermostat goes where people sit. On a double-height great room, which is its own decision and one we cover in the ceiling height and volume post, warm air collects at the top and a ceiling fan or a return air grille up high has to bring it back down.

Defined rooms are easier to condition. A closed living room with a door is one zone with one load, and a bedroom above it is another. That is a real advantage of walls that rarely gets mentioned in the design meeting because it does not show up in a rendering.

The beam that holds the ceiling up

Every interior wall that disappears from a plan was doing a job. A wall between the kitchen and the living room in a two-storey house typically carries the floor above it. Remove it and that load has to travel sideways to a post, then down to the foundation. The thing that carries it sideways is a beam, and the longer the clear opening, the deeper and heavier the beam has to be.

This is where an open plan starts to drive the structure of the whole house. A long engineered beam needs posts at each end, and those posts need footings sized for the point load. If the beam has to hide inside the floor above so the ceiling stays flat, the floor joists have to hang from it with hardware rather than sit on it, and the beam depth is limited by the joist depth. If the beam can drop below the ceiling, it becomes a visible element the designer has to make deliberate. Add a double-height space and the beam is also carrying a roof, in a region where seismic design matters. Structural design for a house in BC is governed by the BC Building Code 2024, in effect for permits applied for after March 8, 2024, and every one of these beams is sized by the structural engineer against it.

What drives the number is the length of the clear span, whether the beam has to be hidden, what sits above it, and how the point loads reach the ground. A plan with a few well-placed posts, which can be wrapped into an island end or a cabinet run, needs smaller beams and smaller footings than a plan that insists on nothing touching the floor for the width of the house. Two shorter spans and one post almost always beat one long span and no post, and nobody notices the post after the first week.

The open plan is the easiest thing to draw and the hardest thing to change. A wall can come out in a weekend. A beam, a post and a footing do not go back in.

Icon Projects Team

Broken-plan compromises that work

Most of the main floors we build in Burnaby now sit between fully open and fully closed. The trade calls it a broken plan. The idea is to keep the connection and the light while giving the family a way to shut something when they need to.

The half wall is the simplest tool. At counter height it separates the kitchen from the dining area, hides the dishes, and gives the sofa a back to sit against. It does nothing for sound or smell, because air moves over it, so it is a visual tool only. Used honestly it is a good one.

Pocket doors are the tool for sound. A pair of wide pocket doors between the living room and the kitchen-dining area gives a room that reads as open when the doors are in the wall and as a closed living room when they are pulled. The cost is a thicker wall with no switches or outlets in the pocket zone, and a track that has to be installed level. We frame the pocket at rough-in even when the owner is unsure, because adding one later means opening a finished wall.

A change of level does the same job as a half wall with more grace on a sloped Burnaby lot. Two steps down from the kitchen to the living area separates the spaces without a wall and follows the grade on a walk-out plan.

The scullery is the tool that does the most. It moves the noise and the smell of real cooking into a small room with a door, leaves the show kitchen as the social space it was drawn as, and adds storage a narrow lot never has. Of all the broken-plan options it is the one owners thank us for most often.

A study or a second living room with a real door, off the main floor, is the last piece. It can be small. It exists so that one person can take a call, or watch a game, or read while the rest of the house is loud. In a house with no defined rooms at all, that is the room that gets missed.

Multigenerational households

Many of the custom homes we build in Burnaby, and in Surrey and Coquitlam, house more than two generations. A grandparent in a suite who comes up for meals, adult children who have moved back, or a young family sharing with parents. The open plan handles the meal well and everything else badly.

What works is a shared centre and separate edges. The kitchen and dining area stay open, because the meal is the point of living together. Around it, at least two rooms on the main floor close: a living room where a grandparent can watch television at the volume they need, and a study or den where someone can work. The suite has its own living space so nobody is a guest in the main room. The bedroom floor keeps its acoustics separate from the great room below. We cover the whole arrangement in our multigenerational home design post, and the layouts that hold up are always the ones with doors in the right places.

What owners tell us at year five

We have written about the regrets we hear at year five, and the main floor has its own list.

The first is the missing door. Owners who asked for open and got it find, a few years in, that there is no room on the main floor to close for a call, a nap, a sick child or a loud game. The household changed. The plan could not.

The second is the kitchen on show. Every dinner party ends with the mess visible from the table, and the host either cleans through dessert or lives with it. A scullery, or even a half wall at the right height, would have solved it at the drawing stage.

The third is the temperature. The glass end is too hot in summer and the kitchen end is too warm in winter, and the thermostat splits the difference. That is a zoning decision that was cheap in design and awkward to change afterwards.

Owners have asked us to add a door after move-in more than once. The pocket door that sits unused and the study that gets used once a week have never made the regret list.

The real choice is which two or three places on the main floor need a door, and the time to draw them is before the beam is sized.

Frequently asked questions

Is an open-plan great room a good idea in a Burnaby custom home?

It is a good idea for a household that cooks, eats and sits together and does not need to close a door on the main floor. It is a poorer fit for a home with a parent in a suite who joins meals, a teenager who wants friends over, or anyone working from the main floor. At Icon Projects we ask about the household ten years out before we agree to remove every wall, and we often land on a broken plan instead.

How do you stop cooking smells spreading through an open-plan house?

Put the hard cooking somewhere with a door. A scullery, a second small kitchen behind the main one with its own range hood, keeps frying and curry off the sofa while the front kitchen stays clean. Where there is no scullery, a properly ducted range hood with makeup air, sized for the range, does most of the work, and a recirculating hood does almost none of it.

Why does an open-plan main floor need bigger beams?

Every wall you remove was carrying the floor or roof above it. That load has to go somewhere, so an engineered beam spans the opening and posts carry it down to the foundation. The longer the clear span, the deeper the beam, and the more it drives the ceiling depth, the post locations and the foundation design. Structural design for a house in BC falls under the BC Building Code, and we have the engineer size every beam before the plan is fixed.

What is a broken-plan layout?

A broken plan keeps the connection of an open plan but adds partial separation: a half wall, a change in floor level, a pocket door, a wide cased opening, or a scullery behind the show kitchen. The rooms read as one space when the doors are open and as separate rooms when they are closed. At Icon Projects it is where most of our Burnaby main floors end up once the family has thought about noise and privacy.

Do open-plan homes work for multigenerational families in Burnaby?

Rarely without modification. Two or three generations under one roof need places to be apart on the main floor as well as in the bedrooms, and a fully open plan gives them one big room. The layouts that work in our Burnaby multigenerational homes keep a shared kitchen and dining area open and put doors on a second living room and any main-floor office, so a grandparent can watch television while a teenager studies.

Can you heat and cool an open-plan house evenly?

Yes, if the mechanical design treats it as more than one zone. A great room with a south-facing glass wall at one end and a north-facing kitchen at the other has two different heating and cooling loads, and one thermostat in the middle serves neither well. We have the mechanical designer zone the space, put the thermostat where people sit, and size the equipment from a proper heat loss calculation rather than a rule of thumb.

Should I use pocket doors or half walls to divide an open plan?

They solve different problems. A half wall gives visual separation and a place to put a sofa or a counter, but it does nothing for sound or smell, since air moves over it. A pocket door or a pair of them closes a room completely when needed and disappears when it is open, at the cost of a thicker wall and no switches or outlets in the pocket. For a room that has to be quiet sometimes, doors win.

What do owners regret most about open-plan layouts?

The thing we hear most is the absence of any room on the main floor with a door: for calls, for a nap, for a grandparent, or for a noisy television. Second is the kitchen being on display at every dinner party, which a scullery fixes. Third is the heating and cooling never feeling right at both ends of the room. Every one of those is cheaper to draw in than to add later.