Is Open Concept Still In?

Almost every renovation conversation we have starts the same way. Someone walks us through the main floor, stops in the middle of it, and says: can we open this up?

Usually the answer is yes, we can open some of it. Almost never is the answer that we should open all of it.

Open concept has been the default renovation ask for twenty years, to the point where a lot of people request it without asking what it costs or what it takes away. We design across BC and Alberta, and the projects our clients are happiest with a decade later are almost never the ones where we took out every wall we could.

Here is the case for keeping some of them.

What removing walls actually costs in a renovation

New construction is one thing. You draw the plan, you size the beams, and the structure is designed around the layout from day one. A renovation works in the opposite direction, and that is where budgets go sideways.

The beam has to land somewhere. Take out a bearing wall and the load above it has to travel down through new posts, through the floor below, and into the foundation. That often means opening the basement ceiling, adding a footing, and pouring concrete. One wall can turn into work on three levels.

You lose ceiling height or you pay to keep it. Flush beams inside the floor system cost more than dropped beams below it. Dropped beams are cheaper and they leave you with a bulkhead running through the middle of the room, which is the thing people were trying to get rid of.

Everything in that wall has to go somewhere else. Ducts, plumbing stacks, electrical, sometimes the furnace return. Rerouting mechanical through a finished house is slow, invisible work. You spend real money and have nothing to show a guest.

It consumes the finish budget. We have watched more than one project spend its kitchen allowance on structure and then settle on cabinets. If the wall is not solving a real problem, that trade is a bad one.

What you give up when the walls come out

Sound. This is the complaint we hear most from people who did a full open-plan renovation five years ago. Dishwasher, range hood, television, phone call, homework, all in one acoustic room with hard floors and a flat ceiling. There is no fix after the fact that works as well as a door.

Smells. Cooking travels. If you cook with oil, fish or spice most nights, an open kitchen puts it in the sofa and the drapes.

Wall space. Walls are not just dividers, they are where things go. Upper cabinets, a pantry, a bookcase, art, a bed with a headboard, a sofa that is not floating in the middle of the room. Strip out enough walls and you end up with a large space that is oddly hard to furnish.

Heating and cooling. Closed rooms are zones. You can heat the room you are in and let the spare bedroom sit cooler. One large open volume with a two-storey ceiling has to be conditioned as a whole, and it will cost more to do it, in Chilliwack winters and increasingly in Chilliwack summers.

Visual calm. In an open plan, every mess is in view from everywhere. That is a daily tax on the household, and it falls hardest on whoever cares most about tidiness.

The case for rooms

Closed rooms are not a compromise. They do things an open plan cannot.

A door is the only real privacy. Two people on calls at the same time, a teenager practising an instrument, a parent working a night shift and sleeping through the morning. None of that works without a door, and no amount of clever furniture placement replaces one.

Small rooms feel good. A den, a snug, a library, a proper dining room. Lower ceiling, deeper colour, one lamp, a door you can close. Every house needs at least one room that feels like a retreat rather than a thoroughfare, and open plans rarely have one.

A closed kitchen is a working kitchen. You can leave the pans out. You can prep for twelve people without an audience. The butler’s pantry keeps coming back for a reason, and the reason is that hiding the working half of a kitchen is genuinely useful.

Rooms create sequence. Moving through a house that reveals itself gradually is more interesting than standing at the front door and seeing everything at once. In older homes especially, that sequence is a large part of the character people bought the house for.

Rooms adapt. A closed room can change jobs. Office becomes nursery becomes guest room becomes office again. A defined room with a door absorbs those changes without a renovation. A corner of a great room does not.

What we usually recommend instead

The version we draw most often now is not full open plan and not the original warren of small rooms either.

• Take out one wall, the one that is genuinely blocking light or making the kitchen unworkable, and keep the rest.
• Widen an existing opening rather than removing the whole wall. A generous cased opening gives you most of the sightline and most of the light at a fraction of the structural cost.
• Use pocket doors or a set of glazed French doors so a room can be open on a Saturday and closed on a Monday morning.
• Add an interior window or a transom to borrow daylight from one room into another without losing the separation.
• Keep the office, the pantry and at least one quiet room fully enclosed, on purpose, in the plan.

That approach usually costs less, keeps more of the house intact, and gives you both things: connection where you want it and separation where you need it.

Open concept is a tool. It is a good one, used deliberately, in the right one or two places. It is a poor default, and treating it as one is how renovation budgets get spent on structure that nobody ends up thanking you for.

If you are planning a renovation and someone has told you the whole main floor has to come out, it is worth getting a second opinion before the demo starts.

Where we come in

Rexford Design is an architectural drafting and interior design studio in Chilliwack, working across BC and Alberta. Drafting and design under one roof. Renovation layouts are exactly the kind of problem we like: figuring out which single wall does the work of four, and drawing it so the structure, the mechanical, and the budget all survive the change. We do design and permit drawings for renovations and additions, and we would rather talk you out of a wall than draw a removal that doesn’t earn its cost. Get in touch.