grace5715 wrote:
Lovely house suitable for retired couple or couple with no kids as there is basically 1 main room for living, eating and relaxing.
Even couples need to get away from each other, maybe a dividing wall or french door needs to be reinstalled.
A fair point in general. However, in this particular house there at least seems to be some attempt to half-partition the living room area and sun room from the kitchen and dining area. And if you really must fiddle away without the prying eyes of your other half on you, there's always the studio.
But I do think it's a good point in general. I've often wondered about this trend of creating large open plan living spaces. They may look great in magazines, but are they the best way to live? Granted, in many houses in Dublin, the original proportions of the rooms can be on the small side. But knocking them all into one doesn't strike me as an ideal solution. Having one big open-plan area is not so good if the house is too small to permit at least another couple of reception rooms.
Those who enthuse about the open plan room often make the point I recently read in some interior waffle piece in the IT: "so Alec and me can be together with Finbarr and Joshua and Sadhbh but all doing our own thing". It's often described as "suiting modern ways of living" but I suspect that just means it suits people who always eat dinner in front of the TV. Come to think of it, I've even viewed houses that had a TV in the downstairs bathroom, so maybe the next logical step is to knock down another wall and have a kitchen-living-dining-toilet space. So you can still be with Ross or Caolan or Eva-Tara when they are doing their thing.
