Having more rooms and more division between them is part of why older houses feel bigger to me.

Modern ones also do some really stupid stuff with square footage. One house we owned had a massive master suite the size of the entire 2-car garage (it was over it) plus some more carved out for the bathroom, but without any dividing walls or doors (even the [large] bathroom was just an open, wide doorway entry, no closing doors). It was huge, but also not quite big enough to divide into multiple spaces with furniture and rugs or whatever without it looking and feeling weird. A kind of awkward fake-luxury size. And it was a front-back split with a living room in the lower part alongside the entryway, with a fireplace and big window... the layout of which made it almost impossible to set up actual living room furniture in a decent way, so we basically didn't use that entire room and used the basement instead.

The house could have been a solid 500 sqft smaller and felt just as large, with some tweaks to the design. Nearly every other house we've owned, aside from one very old one (by American standards-1910s construction), had similar issues with large areas being wasted for one reason or another, due to how they were designed.

I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses. Harder to furnish, and arrange furnishing properly, too (not enough wall space, more backs of things visible)

[EDIT] I'd actually liken the open-floorpan trend to the haphazard McMansion appearance of the outside of houses. One thing I've noticed looking at lots of houses over the years is that nice, big, older houses, or newer ones built with balanced and regular exterior layouts, tend to look smaller on the outside than they actually are—or, put differently, McMansion-style houses look much bigger than they actually are. They're loud, and deceptive. Open floor plans are like that for interior space.

>I think the "open floor plan" trend is mostly to look impressive in photos and to get that "wow" factor when you first walk in. In practice, as commonly realized at least, it's terribly wasteful of space and makes houses feel smaller, because it's harder to get a wall between you and someone else, than it is in older houses.

I don't know. I live in an old house that I've incrementally opened up the first floor of. And I find the largely opened up space much airier and lighter and a generally better use of space than the more closed spaces were. That said, I do mostly live by myself so I don't really run into the issue of not being able to get away from other people unless I retreat to my office or small bedroom.

> it's much more common for newer homes to have more bathrooms than older builds of similar size which obviously erodes living space.

Newer homes also seem to be kitchen heavy, and have larger closets (and also bedrooms), all of which reduces shared (and, but for the bedroom part, total) living space with the same square footage.

Yes, although the dining area is often part of a largely open common area that includes the kitchen and living room.

My brother recently rebuilt a house in Maine and largely went with an open floor plan with relatively modestly-sized bedrooms and bathrooms. It makes pretty efficient use of space. The downside is that if someone want to have their own space, they pretty much have to go outside or retreat to their bedroom.

My house is fairly standard 200 year old New England Cape (though some of it isn't original). I've largely opened up the downstairs to be a common space that I use heavily. Upstairs are four fairly small bedrooms and one small bathroom. It's fine for myself and guests. But even with just two people, there's really only one spare room which I tend to use for staging trips and various hobby stuff I don't want to clutter my office.

I'd add that for a lot of people, one small bathroom would be a deal-breaker although shared bathrooms were considered the norm a few decades ago.

Big kitchens with islands and casual dining space add so much value to a home today. People absolutely love making the kitchen a centerpiece room. It can be used for so many things.

I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes. And that the living room was the center of it all.

>I think in older homes the thought at the time was that the kitchen was a utility room meant for cooking, food storage and dishes.

And in some cases, it was where the servants dealt with such things out of site of any guests.

The house I grew up in had such an arrangement. And although we didn't have a cook, etc., in the sixties, my parents did a lot of large dinner party entertainment. While my mother did the cooking, it would still have been pretty much unthinkable for guests to be hanging out in the kitchen much less helping to clean up etc.

My ideal/dream/lottery home would be laid out as though I had a decent sized staff, utilitarian rooms out of sight, clear division between things. I won't turn down the staff if you're offering, but note that's not what I'm saying - I'd just like each room to be efficient/appropriate for how I'm spending my time when I'm there. A functional kitchen that's easy to clean but can be left in a mess while I send the food up in the dumbwaiter, and myself through the baize, to a more 'form over function' dining room. (Functional as a dining room of course.. I just mean that's decorated for comfort etc. rather than being a work area.)

1960s split levels, knock down a single wall and you have an open floor plan. It is an incredibly common remodel.

They often have vaulted ceilings and front bay windows.

While I do <3 a well done modern floor plan, sadly most new houses have garbage floor plans. Ironically, and IMHO, the smaller houses tend to make better use of space out of pure necessity. Take a 1200sqft 2 bedroom house, tell builders they have another 1000sqft, and they'll shove in a 2nd dining room, 3 closets, another bathroom, but no more useful space.

Related, 2 bedroom 3 bath houses make me want to scream.

Yeah those higher ceilings are very popular, andextremely inefficient. We recently saw this in the new constructed homes in Texas, which made their problem with the power grid last year even worse. The few minutes they gave power to those fancy new home regions (during the time they were cycling power steering) basically went to waste, because the ceilings were so insanely high, and everyone has the open and spacious aesthetic. Many of them had 2 story entrance like ceilings, and few doors to close off where the heat should be directed. Older homes in the north tend towards lower ceilings and smaller rooms with doors - so heating one room can be efficient and fast

Sure, I was going to mention the tradeoff with the inefficiency but left it out for brevity.

I will say, though, that the same inefficiency in those geographic areas exist when building multistoried buildings. A ranch is much easier to cool in west texas/new mexico/arizona than a multistory building where the bedrooms and living areas need to be cooled.

I've notice the construction style also mitigates this somewhat. In the west where slab-on-grade is the norm, ducts run through the attic, meaning diffusers are in the ceiling. This makes natural convection of cold air more efficient, especially when coupled with something cheap like a ceiling fan. But at the end of the day, you're right that there's still substantially more air to condition.

I don't know if I'd say that was even a proximate cause of the texas power grid situation though which was largely due to weatherization issues. Can you elaborate?

There are a lot of articles that go through the issues in detail. The main points they list are that in that climate heating is less of a concern and so inefficient resistant heating is common. Then the grid itself didn't winterize, which lead to some plants not staying up and the others not being able to cover the spike in demand with a reduction in generation capacity.

That's kinda what I'm getting at. The root cause of the failure was not winterizing the plants and infrastructure, not really about residential construction design.

The resistance heating failed due to the grid design, not the other way around. Having more electrical demand would have not been much of an issue, I presume, had the grid been more resilient. Conversely, less resistance heating would not have magically made the grid more resilient.

Plus two story or more ceilings a pain to clean and paint.